Carper, Harry

ORAL HISTORY OF HARRY CARPER
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
with Peggy Carper
March 6, 2002
[Tape 1, Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Harry, why don’t you start out telling us about why and how you got to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Mr. Carper: Okay, Jim. Back in 1945, my boss [Art Dunlap] from the South Charleston Plant of Carbide, that’s in West Virginia, was sent down here, and, of course, working for him up there, he had some problems here, and he called up and asked if I could be sent down there to Oak Ridge on a loan. And so I was sent to Oak Ridge on a thirty, sixty, possible ninety day loan, in the May of 1945. And Art was head of the Equipment Safety and Fire Control Department. And, of course, that was the department we were in in the South Charleston Plant, where I was office manager. And with the problems in setting up equipment safety and fire control, I did [come here], and at the end of about sixty days, Art asked me if I��d be interested in transferring down to Oak Ridge. And I said, “Well, Art, you know, I work for Carbide, wherever they want me.” He says, “Well, we’ll move you down, and when your job is through, we’ll move you back to South Charleston Plant and we’ll have a job for you there at South Charleston.” I said, “All right.” So that’s when we came down.
Mr. Kolb: So it was kind of open ended at that point.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: And did your wife come with you right away?
Mr. Carper: Oh, she came down before I made up my mind, really. I went back in West Virginia and got her and brought her down and let her take a look at Oak Ridge. And then she said, “All right, whatever you want to do.” So we said, all right, go on the housing list, and so we got a house in –
Mr. Kolb: What kind of house?
Mr. Carper: We got a cemesto, a “B” house.
Mr. Kolb: “B”, okay.
Mr. Carper: I’ll have to tell you a little bit about that.
Mr. Kolb: Where was it located?
Mr. Carper: It was on East Price, and I went over every day after work –
Mr. Kolb: That’s where Colleen Black lives.
Mr. Carper: Okay. I went over there and the house had furniture in it, but the yard was in terrible shape, so I worked on the yard for two weeks prior to the time going to West Virginia to get our furniture and move it down. And I worked from the time I got off of work till dark, got it all fixed up, and the day before I was to go back to West Virginia to get the furniture and all, why, the housing people called me and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Carper, you can’t have that house. There’s a court order on it, and they want the furniture. You just can’t have it, that’s all.�� And so what am I gonna do? I said, “My furniture’s already scheduled to come down.” They said, “Well, we’ll give you another house.” And I said, “Where’s that?” And they said, “It’s over on Pelham, 106 Pelham Road.” So I went over and took a look at it, and it was in worse shape than the house that I had worked on for two weeks. The grass and the weeds in the backyard were up almost to my armpits.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my Lord!
Mr. Carper: But anyway, I went back to West Virginia, and we got down here on the train. Odd as it may seem, South Charleston is not that far from Oak Ridge, but getting on a train and coming down, we had our youngster, and we rode a Pullman down, so we got the train at ten o’clock at night in Charleston, and it took nineteen hours to come from Charleston to Oak Ridge by way of train.
Mr. Kolb: Through Knoxville?
Mr. Carper: Through Knoxville, right. And then, of course, the government car met me in Knoxville and brought me into Oak Ridge. But we did, we moved into 106 Pelham Road, and that’s where we lived for, let’s see, until ’48. And, of course, my wife’s mother was with us, and Peggy was pregnant with our second child. So we needed more room, and they gave us a ���D” house to live in with my wife [159 Outer Drive].
Mr. Kolb: This one?
Mr. Carper: This one.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so you moved here in ’48.
Mr. Carper: ’48.
Mr. Kolb: Wow.
Mr. Carper: So I’ve been here all that time, right.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, and you went to work, which plant?
Mr. Carper: It was K-25.
Mr. Kolb: K-25. Happy Valley back then.
Mr. Carper: If that’s what you want to call it.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that’s what it was called.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, there was a community out there.
Mr. Kolb: Which I didn’t know. When I came in ’54, it was gone.
Mr. Carper: Oh yeah, that’s right. The fact is, you see, I was oriented in the old Wheat School.
Mr. Kolb: You were oriented in the Wheat School. Oh, I see.
Mr. Carper: Oriented into Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, they used that as a –
Mr. Carper: That was the employment, they had the employment set up there, and they told us all about it and ran through the security operation and all there in the old Wheat School.
Mr. Kolb: Now, was this all done by Carbide people?
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, yeah. The Wheat School, the old Wheat School was right on a little knoll there, right where the Blair Road cuts off.
Mr. Kolb: Is it near the church?
Mr. Carper: No, it was right on a little knoll there, just on your right after you go down Blair, start down Blair Road off of Oak Ridge Turnpike.
Mr. Kolb: It’s not there anymore.
Mr. Carper: Uhn-uhn.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, seen pictures of it.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So, you were at K-25, and what was your work there, again?
Mr. Carper: Well, I was really a trouble shooter. They call it Industrial Engineering now, but back then, they just called it a trouble shooter. And I set up all the files and everything on equipment safety and fire control. And after that, of course, I took on other assignments, because I was a trouble shooter.
Mr. Kolb: Problem solver, right?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, problem solver. One of the important things I did out there was to develop a system for classified document accountability. That was a real problem with the plant, because when a person terminated, they had to be sure that there were no classified documents in their possessions, and they had to know all of the classified documents that they had read during their stay at K-25.
Mr. Kolb: Had read?
Mr. Carper: Well yeah, yes indeed.
Mr. Kolb: Not just had, but had read.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Carper: So, when all of these things were transpired, I developed a receipt system so that instead of being eight hundred – they were eight hundred man hours behind in posting the move of classified documents, and they had eight people involved, and I set up this receipt system, and we caught up the eight hundred man hours backlog and reduced it down to three people, and we were up to date within the last mail run on every classified document that was in the plant. That system was later adopted by Y-12 and by ORNL and I’m pretty sure it was also adopted by what was then the AEC.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, federal one.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, so it was a pretty good receipt system.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mr. Carper: So we controlled it by paper rather than by posting.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I see, okay. Well, that’s an important –
Mr. Carper: Well, after that, of course, my boss, I suppose one of the best compliments that he ever made, when I got through with that, why, he said –
Mr. Kolb: Who was your boss?
Mr. Carper: My boss at that time was Dick Lowery, and Dick says, “You know, if you don’t do another lick of work from now until the time you’re sixty-five, you’ve paid your salary.” And I said, “Well, that’s fine, but what’s my next assignment?” So they did give me other assignments. I worked on security, and the fact is the phantom badge, that I think was used at the plant when it was closed, I developed because I argued with Washington that the problem was to keep people out of the plant. If they got in the plant, they were going to do their damage, so we spent ninety-nine percent of our money on keeping people out of the plant, rather than covering in and out, in other words, ingress and egress. So I developed that phantom badge system, and that in itself, I think, controlled security out at the plant from an espionage and sabotage standpoint. So –
Mr. Kolb: And K-25 was very, it was very tight security.
Mr. Carper: Very tight security, yeah, so I set up security problems out there to prove just what we needed to get changed.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. Now, when you went in ’45, of course, the Army was involved then.
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Then it switched over to non-military when?
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: About when?
Mr. Carper: Well, it wasn’t very long after that, but I don’t remember the specific time, really, Jim. That’s too far back.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was after the war ended, then it gradually phased over.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. As I understood, at the time when they brought me down, that there were approximately three hundred people that knew what was going on here, and so I don’t know whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, that I was one of the ones that knew what was going on. Because we had to take a polygraph test every six months. Anyone that knew, had any access to top secret information, and every time I’d take it, why, the fellow that gave it, I knew, I knew him very well, I even fished with him, but I’d start down and all of a sudden they’d ask me if I ever disclosed any classified information to an unauthorized person, and by sakes, I’d say no, and that gauge would go up and down just like everything, and then they’d come back in a little bit and say, “Have you ever intentionally disclosed classified information to an unauthorized person?” That line would be just as steady as it could be. They said, “You see, Harry,” says, “you can’t fool it. Your subconscious said, ‘Did you ever say anything to your wife you wasn’t supposed to? Or in the carpool? Or over the telephone, when you weren’t supposed to give classified information over the phone?’” So they always gave me a clear bill of sale on that though.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you kept going.
Mr. Carper: I kept going, that’s right. Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Of course, now, had the war ended when you got here?
Mr. Carper: Oh, no.
Mr. Kolb: Or just before?
Mr. Carper: No, see, the bomb was dropped in August.
Mr. Kolb: And you came in –
Mr. Carper: In May.
Mr. Kolb: In May, okay. But then K-25 was going into production for after the war.
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes.
Mr. Kolb: That was the big push.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Y-12 was shut down shortly after the war. And was K-25 under construction still, or was it operational?
Mr. Carper: No, it was operational. They were finishing up K-25. K-27, K-29, K-31, K-33 were built after that. And then, of course, they had a problem with the in-plant feeding operation out there. This was in 1953. And the Assistant Superintendent of Industrialization walked into my office one morning. He says, “Harry, can I talk with you?” And I says, “Sure, Jim, what’s on your mind?” He says, “Would you be interested in taking over the Cafeteria and Canteen operation?” I said, “What did you say, Jim?” And he repeated himself. I said, “Are you serious?” I said, “That’s the last job in this planet I’d put myself in.” He said, “Well, yes, we’ve lost quite a few hundred thousand dollars a year out there, and the government says we’ve got to do something, and I wonder if you’d want to tackle that.”
Mr. Kolb: So it was a financial problem.
Mr. Carper: I said, “Jim, I’ve got to think about that.�� Well, I was doing cost accounting and budgeting for the Industrialization Division at the time, so I sat there at my desk for thirty minutes, and I didn’t do a thing except think. And I got up and walked down the hall to Jim’s office, and I said, “Could I see you Jim?” And he says, “Sure, come in Harry.” And I walked in and I said, “Jim, I’ve thought it over. I can see ten thousand and one headaches every day, I’ll tell you.” He said, “All right,” he says, “This is Wednesday. I’ll be gone from the plant tomorrow. Friday morning, I’ll take you over and introduce you and you take over, Friday morning at nine o’clock.” I said, “All right.” So Friday morning they took me over and introduced me and I took on the Cafeteria and Canteen. Now we served as many as, over two thousand people in two hour periods in the Cafeteria, one meal a day, and there were seven canteens. Five of them operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The other two just operated during the daytime hours. So I revamped that whole operation, and I suspect I had one of the first self-service type operations in the eastern part of the United States.
Mr. Kolb: Self-service canteen?
Mr. Carper: Absolutely, except for the grill and the cash register, and where we had six people in the Administration Canteen, reduced it down to two.
Mr. Kolb: You were way before your time; you were a cost cutter.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. And we made in the canteen, at the Administration Building, we made twenty-four gallons of coffee every morning in the first forty-five minutes. It was a big operation in the Administration Building.
Mr. Kolb: Now when did this start, now, you took over the canteen?
Mr. Carper: This, in ’53.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so this had been here quite awhile.
Mr. Carper: Oh, yeah, it had. So we made all the canteens a self-service operation except for the grill and the cashier. And the other thing I did, which was quite something at that time, was when I went into the Cafeteria and Canteen operation, they had a back door where they served the colored. And there were no colored people served in the Cafeteria, and I closed all those back doors. And the Union came to me and asked me about it, and I said, “Look, we serve anybody that’s authorized to be in this plant. I don’t care whether they’re employee or a visitor. If we’ve got the food they want to buy, and they’ve got the money to pay for it, we serve them. Not out the back door, though.” And they said, “Well, what about the Cafeteria?” And I said, “Same thing.” He says, “In other words, you��ll serve black people in the Cafeteria?” I said, “Certainly! Do you see any sign that says I won’t?” And he says, “No.” Says, “Will you tell them?” I said, “No.” “What do you mean?” I said, “Just what I told you a while ago. We have food that we’ve prepared for anybody that’s authorized to be inside this plant.”
Mr. Kolb: You integrated the facility.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. So, a few days later, I had a number of blacks come into the Cafeteria, and we serviced them and we never had a problem. And this other thing I changed was when I went over to the Cafeteria, I found all the black help, after the Cafeteria dining room was closed, ate in the kitchen. And I called them together and I said, “Look, what do we do in the kitchen?” And they said, “We cook, we prepare food.” And I says, “That’s right.” I says, “What do we have out front?” “They have a dining room.” I said, “Then why do you eat in the kitchen?” “Oh, we’ve always eaten in the kitchen.” I said, “Well, you’re not going to anymore.” And I said, “From now on, when it’s time for the employees to eat, you take your food and you go out there in the dining room, and you eat like everybody else,” which they did. And I closed up the locker rooms, change rooms in the Cafeteria and made it one for the men and one for the women. And I had no problem.
Mr. Kolb: Well, before you closed the back door to the Cafeteria, did the people bring their lunches in in lunch pails? Or how did they eat?
Mr. Carper: The black people?
Mr. Kolb: Did they all come to the back door?
Mr. Carper: The black ones that didn’t bring their lunch, they went to the back door and got whatever they wanted. And then took it back to their place or outside, sat outside and ate.
Mr. Kolb: So most of them, a lot of them could bring their lunch in. I see, okay.
Mr. Carper: That’s right, yeah. Then, of course, shortly after I got started on the Cafeteria operation, they dumped the Laundry operation on my shoulders too, so I –
Mr. Kolb: On top of the Cafeteria?
Mr. Carper: On the Cafeteria. So I had the Cafeteria, Canteens, and Laundry operation, and I operated that for nine years. And I’ll say this, the first year I operated, I said, “What will you consider a breakeven point?” And they said, “Well, the government feels that if we don’t lose more than one dollar per month per plant employee, that’s close enough to a breakeven. Don’t want to make money, but we don’t want to go in the hole like we have.” He says, “How long will it take you to do that?” I said, “Ninety days.” So I made a lot of changes immediately, and at the end of the year, we had lost one dollar and one cent per month per plant employee.
Mr. Kolb: You’d met your goal.
Mr. Carper: “Hey,” I said, “What do you want to do next year?” And they said, “The same thing.” I said, “All right.” Well, I lost a dollar and two cents per month per plant employee, but I kept my prices down. I still served a cup of coffee for a nickel and a glass of iced tea for a nickel.
Mr. Kolb: Could have raised the price and solved the problem.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. I didn’t want to do that. So the third year, they said, “Do the same thing.” But they had a Union contract that year, and we paid everybody for another, I’ve forgotten how many more holidays, and so that year I lost five thousand dollars. And when I analyzed it, that was the cost of paying all the employees from the Cafeteria and Canteen operation for the holiday they didn’t work. And I just couldn’t cover that that quickly, because it happened during the year. The following year, I took care of that and I made changes, and I covered that, so they said, “We want you to break even.” So I lost two hundred and forty-four dollars that year. So I stayed on top of it. It was a real challenge, and I thoroughly enjoyed the work at the Cafeteria and Canteen. People out in the canteen, Cafeteria would say, “Gee, Harry, that’s delicious, how did you make that?” And I says, “You really want to know?” And they’d say, “Yeah.” I said, ���I’ll bring my chef out. He’s the one that does that. I hired him to do the cooking. I do the administration.” And I could tell you, well, I’ll tell you one good story about the Union. I had a black fellow, name was Pendergrass, and he took care of picking up all of the trash cans and taking them out back and all, and the Union came in and tried to find out, talked to all the employees in the kitchen, asking them if I ever helped them do some of their work. They wanted to put a grievance against me. So Pendergrass, I remember when he told Don this, that was the Union steward, he said, “Now you look here. If I get a trash can or garbage can out there that’s too heavy for me to lift and I stick my head in the office door and say, ‘Mr. Carper, could you give me a hand?’” he says, “I don’t care what he’s doing, he will stop, and he will come out here and help me lift that can up on that truck. So now, if I need you to come in here, I’ll call you. In the meantime, you stay out of here. Because he could say, ‘That’s your job. I’m paying for it. You do it the best damn way you can.’ But he doesn’t do that. He comes out and helps me.” So I had pretty good relationships.
Mr. Kolb: But you never had a –
Mr. Carper: Not a grievance.
Mr. Kolb: – grievance, okay. It sounds like you had quite a few black employees.
Mr. Carper: I had a number of black work shifts.
Mr. Kolb: Was it a majority or just a –
Mr. Carper: No, not a majority, no. We had a strike at the plant, too. And we were in the plant for seventeen days.
Mr. Kolb: Do you remember what year that was?
Mr. Carper: Fifty-three. Shortly after I took over. And we had been assigned, well, I had supervisors, I had forty, forty supervision assigned to me to operate the Cafeteria. We were operating it twenty-four hours a day, instead of just one meal. We fed all during the strike. The first morning, we prepared a hundred and five pounds of bacon and I’ve forgotten how many, I think it was over a hundred dozen eggs to feed the people that had stayed in the plant when the Union walked out. And some of those people had never even boiled water. So we had to go around and teach them the different functions. I had two supervisors, two salaried people working for me, and so we each took different functions in the kitchen and taught people during the first eight hours how to do things, and then left them, and then we’d tell them, you’re gonna have a relief at the end of eight hours. But at the end of eight hours, the person that comes on, you stay with that person until you show them what we have showed you how to do. And then when the next shift comes on, so this is a hand down instruction deal. And we got through that plant, we said we could not make anybody sick. That would blow the Union wide open, you know, the strike. I said, “Every time I turn around, I want to see you washing your hands.” I said, “I got sinks all over this area.” So I said, “You’re going to inadvertently reach up to scratch your head, or you’ll rub your nose. You’re not used to preparing food. So every time you turn around, wash your hands. There’s plenty of soap, there’s plenty of water, and there’s plenty of towels here, and I want it kept that way.” And I said, “Nobody must be” –
Mr. Kolb: Contaminating them.
Mr. Carper: Right. “And you do not eat any foods you wouldn’t eat yourself. If you drop something, put it in the garbage can.”
Mr. Kolb: And wash your hands.
Mr. Carper: “And wash your hands.” So I was right proud of them. They did a terrific job. We got through it without getting anybody sick, and the fact is, people gained weight.
Mr. Kolb: Some people had never cooked before.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. But it was a real experience. It was.
Mr. Kolb: Well, did you ever get a cooking assignment at your house, Harry?
Mr. Carper: Oh, I –
Mr. Kolb: Having this huge responsibility at the plant?
Mr. Carper: Well, I had learned a lot about cooking in my scouting experiences, teaching scouts to cook for Cooking, their badge and all.
Mr. Kolb: When you said you hired all these people, I wouldn’t have the foggiest notion of how to hire a chef. I mean, I guess you take people that say they’re chefs and try them out, or tell me about how you do this.
Mr. Carper: Well, fortunately, the chef that we had there at the time – I did not have to hire a chef; he was there. And he was very cooperative. When they all went out on strike, he said, “Mr. Carper,” he says, “Here’s my telephone number. If you get into a problem, you call me and I’ll tell you what to do, as far as certain foods are concerned.” And, well, you get some idea of what some of the supervisors that were assigned to me to do – I went around this one fellow, and I said, “Well, we’re going to make up the meat loaf today, so would you prepare these green peppers? I have seven pounds of green peppers here,” and I said, “I’d like for you to dice them.” “Oh, sure, I’ll do it.” So, I went and started on away, and I should have known better; I turned around and came back, and he was just cutting up the green peppers. He wasn’t coring, wasn’t taking the seeds out, anything. So I had to re-instruct him as to how you go about dicing the green peppers, you see. So this was the problem I was faced with with people that didn’t know how to cook; but once I gave them the instructions, they were cooperative. They just did a terrific job. I had this one fellow, and I said, “Would you peel me a hundred pounds of potatoes?” “Oh,” he says, “Harry, goodness sakes alive.” He says, “I was on KP in the Army. Can’t you give me something else to do?” I said, “Have you ever seen how we peel potatoes here?” “No.” And I said, “Well, before you make a decision, come out here and let me show you.” So I took him over to the potato machine, peeler machine, and I turned it on and turned the water on, and I took about a peck of potatoes, dumped them in the top, and I said, “Now watch.” And I turned it off, and I rolled the potatoes out and they’d all been peeled because it’s an automatic type machine. “Well,” he says, “If that’s the case, I’ll do it.”
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, “I can do that!”
Mr. Carper: These are some of the experiences I had while I was doing it. In fact they called the dish machine, they called it the “China Clipper.” And the people that operated the –
Mr. Kolb: I wonder why they did that.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, I wonder. But that’s the one they called the “China Clipper.”
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever have to supervise any special meals for dignitaries?
Mr. Carper: Oh, my, yes. Not during the strike. Fact is, I bought special buffet type equipment because, quite frankly, we put on such a good buffet at K-25 that they brought people from X-10 and Y-12 over to K-25 for special dinners in our private dining room we had over there. So, yeah, we did that all the time.
Mr. Kolb: Word got around.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, I had one black woman that – I had a call from the superintendent, he wanted a meal that day at noon, and Tisha Burgess, she was born of slave parents and had been raised in a white home as a servant before she came to work at K-25, and Tisha said, “Mr. Carper, we can’t serve that, ’cause that’s silverware for the private dining room. I don’t have time to polish it.” Well, I said, “Tisha, go over to the laundry and get a box of Tide, and you bring it back, and I’ll show you something.” So she did, came over there, and I said, “Now get a stainless steel tureen out there, soup tureen,” I said, “Put all your silverware in there. Take a cup of Tide, put it in there. Put hot water on it,” and said, “See this piece of magnesium?” I had a piece of magnesium rod that I had used in the anodes for a hot water tank in the Cafeteria or in the Laundry. I dropped that down in there, and I says, “Now shake it a little bit and watch.” And she shook it a little bit, and her eyes got as big as saucers when she saw all the tarnish just suddenly disappear from all the silverware. I said, “Now rinse it, dry it, and put it on the table in there.��� She says, “Mr. Carper, I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Mr. Kolb: Well, I’ve never even heard about that.
Mr. Carper: Well, soft wash, certainly, that’s the way to clean silverware.
Mr. Kolb: I never heard that.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, but anyway, things like that.
Mr. Kolb: The key is magnesium?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, a piece of magnesium and Tide. You need a detergent; you don’t want a soap. Tide is a good detergent for it. And then, in a stainless steel, or, preferably stainless steel.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, not aluminum.
Mr. Carper: You can do your own silverware at home the same way.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I’ll tell my wife that, but, of course, where do you get magnesium?
Mr. Carper: Well, you can buy a little magnesium leaf. You can find them in the store, in the household area. They’re usually there, or a ‘magic leaf’ or something like that.
Mr. Kolb: For this purpose?
Mr. Carper: For this purpose, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I never knew that.
Mr. Carper: After the tarnish comes over onto the magnesium, then you’ll have to take it out and take a piece of sandpaper and sandpaper it off and get it all ready for the next time you use it. It removes the tarnish to the magnesium.
Mr. Kolb: You get a fresh magnesium then.
Mr. Carper: This is right.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve learned something today already.
Mr. Carper: So I had a time with Tisha getting her birth certificate, ’cause there was no record. And what I did, I had to get hold of old family Bibles and back down through the southern part of different states that I would get this, and we finally got enough details to get Tisha a birth certificate.
Mr. Kolb: You said she was the daughter of a slave?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, daughter of a slave. But Tisha was just terrific. She was –
Mr. Kolb: What was her last name?
Mr. Carper: Burgess.
Mr. Kolb: Burgess, okay.
Mr. Carper: Tisha Burgess.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. Was she buried out there at the cemetery out there, possibly?
Mr. Carper: I don’t know, don’t know. I had another young lady, Alberta York, who was a wonderful salad maker. And when we had the strike, she called me up, she lived in Knoxville, and she said, “Mr. Carper, I need the money. Could I come in?” I said, “Alberta, you know I’d love to have you, you’re a wonderful worker,” and I said, “I can’t ask you to come in. If you want to come in, it’s your decision, but if you come in, you bring a suitcase full of what you’re going to need, because you will not be able to leave this plant until the strike is over.” She says, “All right.” In the next few hours, Alberta walked into my office with her grip. I provided her space over at the dispensary where she could sleep. But she worked during the strike. But, here again, after the strike was over, she worked a few weeks, and I finally had a call from her and she says, “Mr. Carper, I’m, I’m leaving.” I said, “Why, Alberta?” She said, “I’m being harassed by the Union. I’m fearful for my children.” She says, “I’m leaving, I’m going to New York, and I have arranged to be a maid for a family up there,” and she says, “I’m sorry to leave you, but I just can’t tolerate this.” So she left. It was a real sad day, because she was a wonderful worker.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, so she paid the price.
Mr. Carper: She had to pay the price. But those are things that I have experienced while I was out at K-25.
Mr. Kolb: Well, anything like that you want to interject, that’s what we want to hear. But let’s move on to your home life a little bit more. You had a young family when you came to Oak Ridge, it sounds like. Just tell me roughly how things were. I mean it was ’45 and things were still pretty crude, right?
Mr. Carper: Oh, indeed they were, yes. I, of course, cover all that in my talk on John Hendrix. Have you ever heard that?
Mr. Kolb: No, I never have. I wish I had.
Mr. Carper: Well, I’ll have to tell you that to begin with. We had a supper club, like you attended the other night at our church. And Patti Loch was there to talk about the Girls Club.
Mr. Kolb: Girls Inc., yeah.
Mr. Carper: It was, back before it was called Girls Inc., it was the Girls Club. And after the dinner was over, she walked over to me and she said, “Would you consider being John Hendrix for the birthday party of Oak Ridge?” I said, “What do you mean, Patti?” And she told me, well, this fellow had been, well, the Playhouse had interviewed people to see who would be selected to be John Hendrix for the birthday celebration, and he had been selected, and my wife would have to tell you his name. I know it but can’t recall it right now. Nall, N-A-L-L. He had been selected and had prepared and made one presentation, I understood, at the Y, and had a heart attack and died.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Carper: And so, here the birthday celebration crew was looking for somebody to take his place.
Mr. Kolb: You hadn’t been one of the other characters.
Mr. Carper: No, I hadn’t applied, no, goodness no. And so, anyway, I said, “I don’t know, Patti, I’ll have to think about it.” And she says, “Well, could you let me know?” And I said, “All right, let me think about it.” Well, I saw, oh, can’t think of his name. That’s the trouble with getting old, you forget names.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right, I’ve got the same problem.
Mr. Carper: Who used to be the –
Mr. Kolb: Paul Ebert?
Mr. Carper: No, it wasn’t Paul. This was the president of the birthday celebration, Dr. – he used to be the –
Mr. Kolb: Smallridge?
Mr. Carper: No, he used to be the doctor for the high school.
Mr. Kolb: Oh.
Mr. Carper: Peggy? Who was the doctor that was the president of the birthday celebration?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Tittle.
Mr. Carper: Tittle, yes. I saw Joe Tittle the following week, and Joe said, “Harry, I’m so glad to hear you are gonna” –
Mrs. Peggy Carper: Was I being paged?
Mr. Carper: Yes. I was remembering that Joe Tittle was the one that Patti had told was gonna, I was gonna be in, who was the other one? Do you remember the other one?
Mrs. Peggy Carper: Was it Chuck Coutant?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, Chuck, all right. Anyway, Joe Tittle saw me and he says, “Harry, I’m so glad you’re going to be John Hendrix.” I said, “Joe, I didn’t say I was going to!” He says, “Oh, yeah, you’ll be it. I know you’ll do a terrific job. We’re going to be glad to have you.” Well, the next day, I saw Chuck Coutant, and Chuck says, “Harry, so glad you’re gonna be.” I said, “Chuck, I haven’t made up my mind yet.” Well, it turns out that I said, okay, I would do it, and I had to do all the research on John Hendrix. And I went to Knoxville and went back through the files in the Knoxville Journal and the Knoxville News Sentinel and went to Clinton, went through the papers over there, and I went down to the Oak Ridge Library, into the Oak Ridge Room, and did all the research that I possibly could on it, and then I began putting my script together to become John Hendrix. In the meantime, I grew a beard, which was what was required. So –
Mr. Kolb: This was 1992?
Mr. Carper: ’92.
Mr. Kolb: The 50th Birthday.
Mr. Carper: In July, in September of ’92, I started becoming John Hendrix. So, I put on the, I thought, the birthday celebration lasted a year, and in December the 31st of ’93, they had a celebration at the Oak Ridge Mall at the close of the birthday. Had a band, we had food, and at 12:00 midnight, my barber, at that time, and I went up on the stage, and he put the cloth around me, and off came my beard.
Mr. Kolb: So John Hendrix went away.
Mr. Carper: That was the end of John Hendrix. Well, in a matter of a few weeks, I started getting calls again for performances of John Hendrix. So I had to decide what I was gonna do. So I finally went out and bought a false beard. And I changed my method of presentation, so that I actually start my presentation out as Harry Carper and then I suddenly become John Hendrix, and I turn around, and with my back to my audience, I get my beard on and my glasses and my hat, and I get my jacket off, and I turn around and say, “Hi. My name is John Hendrix.” And then I go through this, and then down at the end, why, I have become back Harry Carper again, and bring everybody up to date on what’s happened after John Hendrix’ death. So, I even have another performance scheduled for, I don’t know whether it’s this month or next month. So, I’m still doing it.
Mr. Kolb: Still doing it.
Mr. Carper: I’m up around three hundred appearances as John Hendrix, so I’ve done it all over this area, Knoxville, Maryville, Clinton, Kingston; I’ve gone as far as right outside of Nashville. Honey, what was the name of the town we went to outside of Nashville?
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay.
Mr. Carper: What was the name of the town outside of Nashville, where I put on the John Hendrix?
Mrs. Peggy Carper: Hendersonville.
Mr. Carper: Hendersonville. So I went –
Mrs. Peggy Carper: Took our show on the road.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, we went as far as Hendersonville. I’ve been to Crossville.
Mr. Kolb: And you become Mrs. Hendrix.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know about that.
Mr. Carper: But it’s been a wonderful experience to put it on.
Mr. Kolb: I bet, well thank goodness for Patti Loch; she recognized talent where she saw it.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, ah, well, I don’t know about that, but anyway, it has been a wonderful experience to be able to do this.
Mr. Kolb: Well, let’s peel back about forty years, and go back to the forties, and life in Oak Ridge. With a young family, I guess you had a lot of activities.
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes. I was involved with the Boy Scouts at the time. I helped Jack, well, who was the District Executive out of Knoxville. I helped him organize scouting in Oak Ridge. We got things going in Oak Ridge, because it was a problem of being able, since it was a closed area. You see, back in those days, when somebody wanted to come visit you, you had to have a pass arranged for and left at the gate. You had to meet the person at the gate, identify –
Mr. Kolb: Escort them?
Mr. Carper: And escort them, and you were responsible for them and all their activity until they went back out the gate. And usually, it was a twenty-four or forty-eight hour pass is all you got. If it was more than that, then you had to take them down to the guard headquarters, and have a photograph to have a permanent badge made up. You had to sign this and sign that, and so on.
Mr. Kolb: Forty-eight hours or more, you had to get a permanent badge.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, this is right.
Mr. Kolb: So you helped set up the scouting.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Before you got involved, there was no scouting?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, well, it was just, they were trying to get it all set up here, yeah, that was –
Mr. Kolb: So what organizations got involved then, a lot of churches?
Mr. Carper: Churches and we had some of the civic clubs that we wanted to sponsor. They were trying to get organized too. For example, the Lions Club. I was a charter member of the Lions Club.
Mr. Kolb: Right.
Mr. Carper: And we –
Mr. Kolb: Which was what year?
Mr. Carper: 1946. Spring of ’46.
Mr. Kolb: That was before you got here.
Mr. Carper: No, that was after I got here. ’45. I came in ’45.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right.
Mr. Carper: The spring of ’46, we had a, put an article in the paper, Al Bishop did, wanting to know if there were any Lions involved in the Oak Ridge area that would be interested in organizing a Lions Club. And we had a meeting down at the old Oak Terrace. And that was in May. When we got –
[bird noises erupt in the room]
Mr. Carper: My clock.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, I didn’t see that. I thought it was outside.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, we organized, and Al Bishop was elected the first president, and he served May and June of 1946, and then Len Dolen, who was city manager at the time, was elected president for the first full year of the Lions Club, and I was elected president for the following year. I was ’47, ’48. So, ’46, ’47, well, anyway, it was the second full year.
Mr. Kolb: And you had a scout troop? You sponsored a scout troop?
Mr. Carper: Yes, we sponsored a scout troop, and fact is –
Mr. Kolb: Was that just Boy Scouts then?
Mr. Carper: It was Boy Scouts of America, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Not Girl Scouts, just Boy Scouts.
Mr. Carper: Just the Boy Scouts, yeah. Girls had not been admitted back then.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that, okay.
Mr. Carper: No, that’s something that’s been something that’s been in the last few years that girls have been admitted.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, but was there a Girl Scout organization?
Mr. Carper: That I am not sure of. I was not involved at that time with the Girl Scouts. I had been involved with the Girl Scouts back up in West Virginia. I helped organize Girl Scouts up there.
[Tape 1, Side B]
Mr. Kolb: – the Boy Scouts, as you said. But just back to the general living conditions of Oak Ridge at that time, tell me a little bit about the difficulties. When you came here, it was still pretty crude, right?
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, and most of it was dirt and gravel as far as that’s concerned, and just like I was mentioning John Hendrix, I tell in my story that it was so muddy that the government had to build wooden sidewalks so people could get from one place to another without have to wading through the mud, and they built one hundred and sixty-two miles of wooden sidewalks, which is almost the distance from Oak Ridge to Nashville.
Mr. Kolb: That is a fantastic –
Mr. Carper: And that was wooden sidewalks.
Mr. Kolb: – number. I mean, I never heard that before.
Mr. Carper: That’s what it was. So, there was just an awful lot of mud around. Of course, we had the trailer, trailer camp down here where the recreation building is and the municipal building is now, and five thousand trailers in that area. And where the mall is now was called ‘the desert.’
Mr. Kolb: ‘The desert.’ I thought it was called Hutment Village.
Mr. Carper: No, it was called ‘the desert.’
Mr. Kolb: ‘The desert.’ Why?
Mr. Carper: Because that was where the Army did all their maneuvering; they had all their operation there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, was it a field?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, well, wasn’t a field, just a flat area. In fact, it was so flat, that one day a small airplane landed on there. It got lost, and it was a restricted area, of course, and when it rolled to a stop, it nearly scared the life out of the pilot, because the Army was around there with bayonets fixed on the ends of their rifles, and they circled the plane.
Mr. Kolb: This was a private plane?
Mr. Carper: Private plane.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, got lost?
Mr. Carper: Yeah. So that was really something. But that was easy to land a plane on that.
Mr. Kolb: But this was what direction from Hutment Village, east?
Mr. Carper: Oh, there were hutments all down along where the new bank, TN Bank is, there was a bunch of hutments in that area, all through there. And, of course, Woodland was not anything except woodland then. There were no, there were no buildings in there at that time.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, just woods?
Mr. Carper: Just woods. In fact, there used to be what we called Camp Cromer; [it] was a rugged area where the Boy Scouts had their camporees [sic], over in there, so.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, was there a Woodland School there then?
Mr. Carper: Uhn-uhn.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, that came later.
Mr. Carper: That came later.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. So I’ve heard about the mud and the bus system was pretty important, right?
Mr. Carper: Oh, the bus, yes.
Mr. Kolb: You rode the bus to work, I take it, I assume?
Mr. Carper: No, we had – well I did once or twice, but we really had a car pool. And when we go to K-25, right where the guard shack is, I think you know where that is, right beyond the country club, on the right-hand side was a farmhouse and a spring. The spring is still there, and they’ve got it going under the road now, but there used to be so much water and everything and it was so soft that that area would sink. My guess is that there must be fifteen feet of gravel under the bit of that road, right in that area.
Mr. Kolb: Top it up.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, because there was so many – well, when you think of twelve thousand people at K-25, think of the traffic mashing that road down, and it was just all gravel.
Mr. Kolb: Of course, this was after Happy Valley was closed, and people were commuting ���
Mr. Carper: No, still, Happy Valley was still there.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Mr. Carper: Yeah. That was quite a few years later that Happy Valley closed, yeah. I say, quite a few years, it was several years later, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause I came in ’54 and it was gone then.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. You see, there were a lot of hutments out there too.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mr. Carper: The hutments were for J. A. Jones.
Mr. Kolb: Construction people.
Mr. Carper: Construction people. Oh, and they had barracks out there, right at K-25, they had barracks. And they had a bowling alley, and they had a theater. I’m not sure about the bowling alley. They did have a theater. But I believe they did have a bowling alley.
Mr. Kolb: Recreation hall?
Mr. Carper: Recreation area.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. Cafeteria?
Mr. Carper: Yeah. Things like that.
Mr. Kolb: But you were here in town. And I guess you were active in your church, probably, too? (To Mrs. Peggy Carper: Just a little warm-up there is fine. That’s fine, thank you).
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes. (To Mrs. Peggy Carper: I have plenty, thank you, Honey.)
Mrs. Peggy Carper: Do you?
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mrs. Peggy Carper: How ’bout another cookie?
Mr. Kolb: No, no thank you
Mrs. Peggy Carper: No? You?
Mr. Carper: No thank you, Honey.
Mrs. Peggy Carper: Okay.
Mr. Carper: Yes, we were quite interested in the Chapel on the Hill. It appealed to us. We went down and found out it was ecumenical, and so we became members of the Chapel on the Hill, United Church. I served as chairman of the trustees for the church. And fact is, Art Dunlap and I rewrote the constitution and bylaws for the United Church. And then they asked me to be choir director and Peggy to be the organist.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, that’s where you started your choir directing.
Mr. Carper: Well, we had done it; we had done that up in West Virginia.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, I didn’t know that.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, well, we had a program in West Virginia, I digress just a minute.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay.
Mr. Carper: In Beckley, West Virginia, back in ’38, we had a youth choir for the Methodist Temple. We had forty teenagers, and we put on the radio program, brought it on the air at nine o’clock every Sunday morning, had a program from nine to nine-thirty called the Young Peoples Church of the Air.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my.
Mr. Carper: And we had the youth do all the work. Peggy played and I directed, but they sang anthems and we had one young fellow who gave the morning devotional and all this. And nobody over, out of the teens. They had to be in their teens to be a member of the choir. So, thirteen to nineteen. And the interesting part is, the fellow who gave the morning devotionals on that program decided he wanted to go into ministry, and became the minister of the largest Methodist Church in West Virginia. His name was Aldred Wallace.
Mr. Kolb: Wallace, okay.
Mr. Carper: So we were very proud of the fact that he did, and, of course, we left in 1940. I went with Burroughs Adding Machine Company, so we had to stop that operation, but we had served as choir director and organist up there in West Virginia.
Mr. Kolb: So were you the first? Was there a choir at the United Chapel on the Hill when you joined there?
Mr. Carper: Yes, there was a choir there.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and you joined the choir?
Mr. Carper: Yes, Bob Seibert was the organist/choir director. He was a combination organist/choir director, and Bob left and went up north someplace; I forgot where he was.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, you got involved then.
Mr. Carper: And then my wife and I got involved in it. She was.
Mr. Kolb: And you were there for quite a few years, I guess.
Mr. Carper: Till 1951, I believe it was, we were. And then –
Mr. Kolb: Who was the pastor back then, of that church?
Mr. Carper: There was several. At the time we went there, there was Dr. Larson, who was a Presbyterian minister at the time. And then when he left, a fellow by the name of Abel came. After Abel was Bill Huntsman.
Mr. Kolb: Huntsman?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, Bill Huntsman. And –
Mr. Kolb: Now, were these all outsiders who came in?
Mr. Carper: Oh, yeah, from out of the area in. And, I can’t think of the other fellow’s name. And then after he left, or they left, ’cause that was a combination at the time, Harley Patterson came. And then Harley was there for years. And that’s when we left.
Mr. Kolb: But in ’45, when you came, I understand that Chapel on the Hill was interdenominational and it had many chapels, right?
Mr. Carper: Had many chapels, and all the churches that met there met at different times. They had scheduled times, and what we did, we had carts, and these were on rollers, and they put the hymn books for the particular denomination in the cart and locked them with a padlock, and rolled them into a room in the front of the church, and the next group would come in and set the church up for that. We had the Jewish congregation used it, we had the Catholic congregation used it, we had the Methodists, let’s see, yeah, not sure, no, I’m not sure about Methodists. Methodists met in the Ridge Theater.
Mr. Kolb: Too many of them?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, well, scheduling of things per se, ’cause the Presbyterian group that met there met in the afternoon. The United, the church, met at eleven o’clock. But, and I don’t remember all the other schedules, but that was really the first time that you had services once on Sunday instead of twice, because they had to use the facilities for so many different denominations.
Mr. Kolb: Did that include the evening?
Mr. Carper: Through the evening, all the way. And, of course, the front of the church was, the chapel, was built so that it could be used for the different denominations, and based on how they wanted the front of the church, and then it would be cleansed and redone for the next congregation that came in.
Mr. Kolb: It was like that.
Mr. Carper: Yes. The way that things happened.
Mr. Kolb: Was it like an hourly progression?
Mr. Carper: Just about. That was about every two hours. They gave them time to go in and do their job, and then out.
Mr. Kolb: Change, yeah. I just heard about that, I never experienced it.
Mr. Carper: We thought it was quite interesting to have the choir in the back of the church, like they do at the Chapel on the Hill, because this was a demand on the pronunciation of all your words.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you’re further away from the congregation.
Mr. Carper: Well, and you’re behind them, and you’re singing over top of them, so you’ve got, you don’t have the sense of sight that so many times, when you’re in the church, you’re looking at the people, you’re watching them as they sing. You don’t have that. So you have to appeal to the other senses when you’re singing behind them. And so the pronunciation had to be a lot more distinct and understandable, because they weren’t watching you.
Mr. Kolb: Right, right.
Mr. Carper: But that was very interesting, and I remember the Presbyterian Church met, later, they met at the Pine Valley gymnasium, and the preacher there was standing under the basketball pole while he was preaching. That was Bob, well –
Mr. Kolb: That’s all right.
Mr. Carper: Anyway.
Mr. Kolb: Did you switch to First Presbyterian when they got organized, then?
Mr. Carper: Well, not when they got organized. When they got their church started, they built the church where it is right now, and we went there, Peggy was asked to do a, to relieve the organist there, and she had played the organ not only at the Chapel on the Hill, but also at the Chapel in East Village, which was a Christian Science. She had substituted there, ’cause Anna Cebrat was the soloist there. And Anna Cebrat was a wonderful singer. She was librarian for the Oak Ridge School, and so Peggy played for her down there when she sang.
Mr. Kolb: Is that what’s now a Baptist church in East Village?
Mr. Carper: Well, that’s the old dormitory, though the chapel is still on beyond that. It’s a little chapel. I don’t know who’s using that chapel now, but they were Christian Scientists out there. I don’t know whether they are now or not.
Mr. Kolb: That’s Highland Woodland.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, Woodland has the Christian Scientists now.
Mr. Kolb: So then, did she become the organist there at First Presbyterian?
Mr. Carper: Yes, at Presbyterian.
Mr. Kolb: And you followed her?
Mr. Carper: Scarbrough, who was music teacher, Gil Scarbrough, at the high school was choir director, and Peggy took over as organist, because the organist and her husband went to – I think it was Washington, a reassignment. And she was there for a few months when Gil decided that he wanted to be relieved, and I took over, and we stayed there for, oh, nearly thirty years, I suppose.
Mr. Kolb: And did you not sing, or do you sing in the ORCMA Chorus also?
Mr. Carper: I sang at the ORCMA, and Peggy did too. We both sang in the Chorus.
Mr. Kolb: So, were you original members, or when did that start?
Mr. Carper: No, not original.
Mr. Kolb: When did you start singing, later on?
Mr. Carper: I couldn’t tell you the date. It was later on.
Mr. Kolb: I knew I remembered seeing you in the chorus sometime back. So you had a very active musical career, it sounds like. I know, I belong to a choir, so it’s a weekly thing, and if you’re a director, you really have to do a lot of preparation for it. You don’t just walk in and start singing, that’s for sure. So did you have any training in this area, or did you just have a natural feel for it?
Mr. Carper: Well, my wife, for example, is, I think, a natural born musician. Her mother was very musically inclined, and she was an organist and taught music. My wife had one year of piano training when she was twelve years old, and that was it. But she plays piano, and she plays organ, she plays by ear, she plays by music, she can change the key if you want it in another key, so she’s very, very talented, yes.
Mr. Kolb: But you also have a musical ability.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, but not like that. No, not like that. And I tell them, when I teach music, choir, I tell them that ninety percent’s gotta come from the heart, ten percent from the mouth.
Mr. Kolb: Well, yeah, sure.
Mr. Carper: And, so, you’ve got to feel it. You don’t want it to be mechanical. You want to have the feel, there, of the music, so that’s the important thing. And, of course, a few years back in the early fifties, Bob Knight and I got all the choir directors in town together, and we agreed to have the Christmas portion of Handel’s Messiah put on by the combined church choirs. So Bob directed the first year of that, and I directed the second year. I was backup for the first year, and we did this each year. We had a backup choir director, and they took over for the following year. We gave the first performance when the Methodist Church was not quite finished. In fact, there was no benches up there. We had planks on boxes, on what you would normally call orange crates, sitting so that we could get the people in the choir loft there.
Mr. Kolb: About what year are we talking about now?
Mr. Carper: Fifty, about ’53 I suppose it was.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, ’53, okay.
Mr. Carper: Yes, and we had over a hundred members in the choir. And each church had their soloists; we selected soloists, had tryouts for the different solo parts. And so it was a wonderful experience to do that. And Peggy’s mother, who was living with us at the time, played for me in the second year when I directed the combined church choir.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, ’cause I remember going to some of those later on and they don’t do it anymore, which I regret.
Mr. Carper: No, well, they took it to the high school auditorium. They took it out of the church and took it to the high school auditorium one year, and that seemed to kill it, getting it out of the church. Handel’s Messiah, the whole performance, for some reason, the people in town preferred it to be in a church. So, Ed Struxness was one of the choir directors, and –
Mr. Kolb: Was he from Grace Lutheran?
Mr. Carper: Let’s see, Ed Struxness –
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t he from Grace Lutheran, as I recall?
Mr. Carper: I believe he was Grace Lutheran.
Mr. Kolb: As I recall, yeah.
Mr. Carper: I believe it was. And, let’s see, I can’t remember. O’Reilly Barrett, too, was one of the original choir directors for the Presbyterian Church. I don’t know whether you remember Reilly, because he has passed away, but Reilly was, and –
Mr. Kolb: Before you?
Mr. Carper: He was before Scarbrough. It was Reilly, then Scarbrough, then me for the Presbyterian Church.
Mr. Kolb: Good. Well how about your kids, going to school here? Let’s see, you had a child, baby, when you moved here, and so they got into school here.
Mr. Carper: Yes, he was five, and he went to Pine Valley.
Mr. Kolb: Pine Valley.
Mr. Carper: And –
Mr. Kolb: Who was the principal, or do you remember?
Mr. Carper: I don’t remember who was principal over there.
Mr. Kolb: Was it Dodd? ’Cause my wife, Sarah –
Mr. Carper: Well, Dodd was over here at Cedar.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Cedar. My wife taught at Pine Valley. She came in ’55. Taught there three years before we got married.
Mr. Carper: Well, you see, we were up here then, and they went over here to Cedar Hill instead of Pine Valley.
Mr. Kolb: Cedar Hill, okay, so they, your children went to Cedar Hill.
Mr. Carper: Yeah and Bobby Huffman was over here, was one of the teachers that, and we, Peggy had known Bobby up in West Virginia before she came here, and I remember Mrs. Kees was over here and Herbert Dodd.
Mr. Kolb: Were the teachers good? Did you have good rapport with them?
Mr. Carper: Generally speaking, yes. I thought they were very good. I am not a booster of Herbert Dodd. He’s, as far as I’m concerned – but we’ll leave it at that. I had my reasons, but anyway.
Mr. Kolb: He’s passed on now.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. I worked with the Cedar Hills School people in setting up the Sight Room at Cedar Hill through the Lion’s Club, and that was in ’47, I suppose, when we set that special Sight Room up at Cedar Hill School.
Mr. Kolb: A Sight Room.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Tell me about that. I don’t know what that means.
Mr. Carper: Well, it was for the children who had a problem seeing at the time. They enlarged different things and they had special teachers for teaching the children who had sight problems.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see, okay, special books too?
Mr. Carper: Yes. And I don’t know when it was done away with, and I do remember we set it up, because it was encouraged at the time, through the Lion’s Club.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s one of their big programs.
Mr. Carper: Right. As you noticed from my resume, I did receive the distinguished service award for Young Man of the Year from the Junior Chamber of Commerce in 1950.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I was going to bring that up. You were in the Lion’s Club, and the Chamber of Commerce, Junior Chamber of Commerce.
Mr. Carper: No, I was not a member of Chamber of Commerce.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I assumed you were.
Mr. Carper: No, you see, these were nominations from anybody in town. Fact is, one of the ones that you probably did know that was nominated at the same time I was, was an attorney here.
Mr. Kolb: Still alive?
Mr. Carper: No. He was appointed to the judgeship and went to Chattanooga.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, not Wilson.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Wilson?
Mr. Carper: Yeah. He and I were both, there were six of us, and Harvey Bernhardt, Dr. Bernhardt was one, and I can’t remember the others. We were all nominated for young man of the year by the Jaycees, for 1950, and how I got it, I don’t know. It must have been a quirk, because, anyway –
Mr. Kolb: It happened.
Mr. Carper: It happened, yes.
Mr. Kolb: That’s what’s important. Yeah, [I] remember that. Well, you know, your fame has preceded you and followed you Harry, so there you go.
Mr. Carper: I love to do the Junior Chamber beauty pageants. I did enjoy emceeing those when I did that for them down on Blankenship Field. And fact is, I was emcee for the beauty pageant when Sonya Wilde was selected as Miss Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and became Miss Tennessee.
Mr. Carper: And then after that, of course, she married Jake Butcher. And I did enjoy the Christmas parties. I emceed the Christmas parties for Carbide at the high school, three, let’s see, four parties a day. Nine, eleven, one, and three.
Mr. Kolb: That was a busy day, wasn’t it?
Mr. Carper: There were fifteen hundred at each one of them.
Mr. Kolb: That went on for years until Carbide left, and then they didn’t have it anymore.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, I remember, one of the last ones I did, I had a fellow walk up to me, and he says, “Mr. Carper, this is quite special.” And I said, “What do you mean, ‘this is quite special’?” He says, “Well,” he says, “my dad brought me to the Carbide Christmas parties when you were emceeing them years ago, and here I am back with my youngster, and you’re still emceeing them.”
Mr. Kolb: Some people never quit.
Mr. Carper: But it was fun, playing games with the kids from the stage, singing songs and things.
Mr. Kolb: Now Carbide sponsored that. I guess they had other people from the organization involved and supporting it, but from the Carbide organization, that is, or did the community, did the city help out with that?
Mr. Carper: No, this was strictly Carbide. They took care of providing the Santa Claus and providing the stockings with the candy in it that they gave out to all the kids, and we always had a, some kind of a program, like a clown program or an animal program, or something like this, and then we had cartoons. So we had all of this in the one hour program.
Mr. Kolb: Before you had cartoons on TV every day like we do now.
Mr. Carper: Well, there were some cartoons at the time, but mostly at the theater. We used to ask the kids, “What do like to see on Saturday at the show?” “Cartoons!” you know, and I’d talk to them and get them riled up for cartoons.
Mr. Kolb: Well, speaking of entertaining, did you ever act, do any acting in the playhouse here?
Mr. Carper: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, ’cause you might have, because you were selected for John Hendrix there, but I just wondered. I thought you might have.
Mr. Carper: Well, I’ll tell you basically why. Back when I first started doing emcee work, I tried to have everything all set, and I found out that that’s not the way to emcee. You have to have your cues, and that’s it, because the way things happen is not normally the way you want them if you’ve got it all written out. So I adlibbed and in adlibbing, I got to the point where I found it very difficult to memorize something and stick with it. I wanted to adlib it, and you can’t do that on the stage. So I just never did go out for anything where I had to do the strictly memory work. But put me on the stage and let me emcee, and I’ll play it by ear, with cues, then I was in pretty good shape.
Mr. Kolb: Did pretty well there, it sounds like. Did you enjoy going to the playhouse though?
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, yes. We’ve been members of the playhouse for, oh, I don’t know –
Mr. Kolb: Forever.
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: We’re the same way. Tremendous asset to the community. What do you think about or remember from the time when the city opened up, when the vote was taken, and tell us what your reactions were and what went on then. Were you involved in that? I mean, it was a pretty emotional time as I understand it.
Mr. Carper: Well, yes, I was not involved in it personally, other than the fact that we did attend the ceremonies when they had Marie MacDonald and Alben Barkley and Rory Calhoun and Adolphe Menjou here, when the gates were opened, and it was down to the Elza. That’s where the official ceremony took place. And then they had the ribbon across there, and they simulated cutting the ribbon with atomic power, and burning the ribbon through and all, and it was quite a, quite a shindig that they had for the cutting of the –
Mr. Kolb: Big parade.
Mr. Carper: Oh, my, yes, big parade. As I recall, in that parade there were representatives from every state in the United States that were living here, and I’m not sure, but it seemed to me like there was around twenty-some foreign countries that people were living here, that were there from foreign countries, that were here in town at the time.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, were they on a program? They were introduced or something?
Mr. Carper: No, it was just, and we knew that in making up the parade, they had their own country flags and everything, and they marched in the parade, and the state flags, of course. That’s just like the United Church. Back when we were members of the United Church, there were thirty-two different denominations represented in the United Church. Think of that.
Mr. Kolb: Wow, sinners of all stripes.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. That’s why we thought it was so ecumenical.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, of course.
Mr. Carper: We had representatives from all these different churches that had joined together to make up the United Church.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was truly amazing.
Mr. Carper: Even, there was one Catholic in the United Church.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right.
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Of course, the Jewish, they worshiped there, but were they considered one of the thirty-two?
Mr. Carper: No, we were talking about thirty-two different –
Mr. Kolb: Christian.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, thirty-two different Christian denominations were represented on the roll of the United Church.
Mr. Kolb: Wow. How many of those were Baptist?
Mr. Carper: I don’t know. There were a lot of different Baptists, now, they could have been.
Mr. Kolb: There could be half a dozen right there.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, it could have been; right, it could have been.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. That’s always something that has intrigued me about Oak Ridge being unique, in that I come from a very strong Lutheran background, so when I left my family, I was expected to go to a Lutheran church, which I did. But a lot of people in our Lutheran church are from different denominations, and they come to Oak Ridge, and they choose the church that they really like.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Independent of what their parents or their relations expect them to do.
Mr. Carper: This is right.
Mr. Kolb: And this is where Oak Ridge is, you might say, more honest, if you will.
Mr. Carper: This is right, yeah. We found that to be true, Jim, so much so.
Mr. Kolb: And it’s different.
Mr. Carper: It is.
Mr. Kolb: And I’m not saying you shouldn’t follow your tradition, as I have, but it’s just more interesting, because you have contact with so many different types of people.
Mr. Carper: Well, my wife was brought up in the Methodist Church. I was brought up in the Southern Presbyterian Church, and while I was a teenager, I went to a Baptist church. I liked the crowd, and I liked the music program and took part in it there, and –
Mr. Kolb: Both of my daughters went to Baptist churches when they were in high school, or took part in the youth groups, ’cause they were so active, you know, it’s interesting, you know.
Mr. Carper: One of the most interesting experiences I ever had was, we had a Jewish minister, a Jew who had become Christian, and that came and stayed in my mother and dad’s home for a week while he conducted a revival at the Christian church in West Virginia. And this was back in the late twenties.
Mr. Kolb: And that didn’t happen very often.
Mr. Carper: No. And this fellow, I just thought the world of him, and he was a good Christian minister, but he was of Jewish background, had been disowned by his family because he did not stay in the Jewish belief, and the revival, the church couldn’t hold them. They opened the windows, people were outside, they were – everything in our little small town.
Mr. Kolb: He had a real talent.
Mr. Carper: Oh, he really had a talent, yeah. I remember his name: Harry Louan.
Mr. Kolb: There’s a Louan in Oak Ridge. I can’t think of his first name. I don’t think he was Jewish.
Mr. Carper: I’m not sure how he spelled it, but –
Mr. Kolb: But, he always did the connection with Russia. He knew Russian and he could go to Russia and translate or be an interpreter.
Mr. Carper: And speaking of that, you see, they used to give me the – if they had problem people in the plant, they usually asked me to see if I could work them and straighten them out.
Mr. Kolb: Problem people.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. Just didn’t seem to fit in.
Mr. Kolb: Personality you mean, or something?
Mr. Carper: Yeah. I had one that was, that they had asked me to take on that was one of the most unusual experiences I ever had in my life. His name was Jack Rollins. He was assigned to me, and he sat down, he says, “Now, you understand, Harry, that when I was hired, I was told I could work whatever hours I wanted to work in this plant.” And he says, “I work twenty-four hours a day, Monday through Friday.”
Mr. Kolb: My goodness. What?
Mr. Carper: And he says, “Then I go home, which is to Oak Ridge,” and he says, “I go by and I get a shot at the hospital, and I go to my apartment and then I sleep, and I sleep, and I sleep, and Sunday I get up and shower and I head for the plant, and I don’t go home until next Friday.”
Mr. Kolb: Five more days.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Good grief.
Mr. Carper: He says, “Now, what I have is high altitude insomnia, as a result of flying for the Royal Canadian Air Force.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, it’s a medical condition.
Mr. Carper: I said, “All right, Jack, we’ll see how it works out.” Well, it was difficult to supervise a man when you’re only there around nine hours, which is about the time I usually spent at the plant, instead of eight. And Jack was immaculate, his black hair, every hair in place, his clothes were there. He didn’t own an automobile. I never saw him smoke a cigarette, never saw him take a drink of beer. He could pick you or I up by the seat of the pants and the nape of the neck and hold you right out in the air.
Mr. Kolb: Strong?
Mr. Carper: Strong as an ox.
Mr. Kolb: What did he do? What was his job?
Mr. Carper: Any assignment you wanted. I put him on different assignments, one I thought was very important, which did work out that way, was forms coordination. We had so many forms all over the plant. Everybody that wanted something always made up a new form. And so I had him collect all the forms that were in the entire K-25 plant and see if any could be consolidated, so that we could reduce the number of forms that the printing department had to make up, which we did. I can’t tell you how many thousand different forms we had in the final analysis, but Jack did a terrific job on it. But he could speak five foreign languages, could read, write.
Mr. Kolb: He was a talent.
Mr. Carper: He was a genius. He had a photographic memory.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my Lord!
Mr. Carper: And, if you opened up a dictionary and said, “Jack, I can’t pronounce this. Well, let me spell it to you, this word,” and I’d spell it, and I’d say, “Well, what’s it mean?” and he would almost quote what was in the dictionary.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause he had memorized the, my Lord.
Mr. Carper: He was just unbelievable. I tried different things. I took Jack, one day, and I said, “Jack, do you like to hunt?” “Love to hunt.” I said, “Let’s go hunting some weekend.” He said, “All right.” I said, “Will it bother you, not getting to sleep?” “Oh, no, that won’t bother me.” I said, “Well, what about hunting equipment?” “Oh, I’ll get it.” And I said, “All right, how about a place to hunt?” “I’ll get it.” I said, “All right.” So in a few days, Jack says, “I got it all squared away for this Saturday.” I said, “All right, Jack, what time?” He says, “You want to meet me around five o’clock, down at the,” he lived in one of these “A-1” efficiencies. He was not married. He’d been married and divorced years ago. I said, “All right, Jack.”
Mr. Kolb: This is five a.m.?
Mr. Carper: Five a.m. So I pulled down there in the car and here walks Jack out with all the hunting gear on, beautiful, nice shot gun. I said, “Well, where are we going?” He says, “We’ll get the dogs over in Clinton.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh my goodness.
Mr. Carper: I said, “All right.”
Mr. Kolb: Dogs and all.
Mr. Carper: So we went to Clinton. And I said, “You tell me where.” We went out Eagle Bend, and he says, “Here’s the house right here.” It turned out to be Dr. Hoskin’s house, Hoskin Drug Company. He said, “Pull around back.” Pulled it around back. Wasn’t daylight yet. Window raised up up there, the lady says, “Is that you, Jack?” He says, “Yes, it is.” “Well, you know where the dogs are.” And he says, “Yeah.” So we got two bird dogs and put them in the back of the car. And we took off. I said, “Where to now?” Jack directed me. He’d made arrangements with some farmer out there, quail hunting on his property. We stopped and got out, and I thought, well, I’ll find out what Jack’s doing. I said, “These look pretty good, don’t they Jack.” And he says, “Yeah, that looks pretty good.” I said, “Well, let’s go this way.” “Okay.” I just couldn’t get him to disagree. We hunted hard that day with the most beautiful two bird dogs I ever saw in my life. They’d been college trained. All I had to do was signal, and those dogs knew exactly what to do. Didn’t even have to whistle or anything. They did it all by hand sign. Well, we got through, took them back, and Jack was just the perfect hunter. Anything I suggested, no problem. We didn’t get much game that day, but we had a terrific time out there. Jack wore a yellow slicker and a yellow hat when it was raining. You could see him a mile off coming. He walked every place. The only time he didn’t walk was when he rode the bus from K-25 to here, and that was once a week, going one way and back the other. So Jack got to bothering some of the nurses that night, interfering with their work. It came back to me and I confronted him about it and he says, “Yeah, I did, I was up there.” I said, “Jack” –
Mr. Kolb: Was he trying to be romantically involved?
Mr. Carper: No, no, just sitting around, you know. I said, “Jack, we can’t tolerate that. Now, if you keep this up, we’re going to have to put you on an eight hour day.” He says, “Harry, you know I can’t do it. I’ve got to work twenty-four hours.” I said, “Well, then you do the job we’ve assigned you on, stay away from that.” “All right.” Well, this went on for a few weeks, and I got another complaint. I called Jack in, and I said, “Jack, this is the second time. It better not happen again.” It happened a third time, and I said, “Jack, here.” It was written out what he had done, what the complaint had been about. I said, “You read it.” I said, “Is that correct?” He says, “Yes it is.” I said, “You sign it.” He says, “All right.” He signed it. He had read the complaint. And I said, “If it happens again, you’ve had it. I’m just going to have to let you go.” “Okay Harry.” A few weeks passed and it happened again. And I called Jack in, and I said, “Jack, what about so-and-so and so-and-so?” “Yes, Harry, I did.” I said, “Your pay will be waiting for you at the gate.” “Okay.” He walked out and in a very short period of time, he walked back in my office, and he had a package, and he handed it to me, and I said, “What’s this, Jack?” He says, “It’s something I wanted you to have.” I opened it up. It was a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus. He said, “You know, Harry, you were the best boss I’ve ever had.” And I had just fired the guy. And he walked out, and I never have heard from him.
Mr. Kolb: He gave you this Roget’s Thesaurus.
Mr. Carper: He gave me this copy.
Mr. Kolb: As a present.
Mr. Carper: As a present. But he says, “You’re the best boss I’ve ever had. I want you to have this.” And he walked out and that was it. We never knew whether Jack was an espionage agent or not, because Russian was one of the languages that he could do anything he wanted, and he had a photographic memory, look at plans. I never could tie it down.
Mr. Kolb: Is that the last you ever saw of him?
Mr. Carper: That’s the last I ever saw him, last I’ve ever heard of him. But this was one of the several problems, and that was the most interesting one that I had had assigned to me.
Mr. Kolb: That man was an asset, but he could have been recruited.
Mr. Carper: This is right.
Mr. Kolb: Had he – he sounds like kind of a loner, but yet he – was it compulsive in going to these, this problem that he had, going to the nurses?
Mr. Carper: Well, it wasn’t necessarily the nurses. If there were anybody down in Central Control place or anything, he’d go in and bother them.
Mr. Kolb: Was he just wanting to have interaction?
Mr. Carper: I think so, yeah, but they couldn’t get rid of him, you know. And I wasn’t out there to supervise him, and I’d say, “Jack you can’t do it. You do the assignment I’ve given you, but that’s it.”
Mr. Kolb: But you don’t know, I mean, he had a security clearance obviously, and you don’t know what happened after he left here.
Mr. Carper: Don’t know. I’ve often wondered.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, there may be some F.B.I. record somewhere.
Mr. Carper: Could have, yeah. I can see Jack just as well right now, I can see him walking out through the plant, and I tell you, he was quite a guy. He must have weighed about two-hundred-and-twenty-five pounds, about six feet tall, never saw him unshaven, never saw him with a hair out of place.
Mr. Kolb: Well, he could find a job, you know, doing who knows what, there was no problem, but just, well, you were fair with him.
Mr. Carper: He was a genius.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t mistreat him, and you probably had a lot of problems with supervision, and because of his talent, looking jealous if nothing else. That’s an amazing story. Well, I’m sure you’ve got lots of stories of supervising crazies or whatever, but that brings to mind, I was told by somebody that there were in Oak Ridge, and this was probably during the war, I don’t know how long it lasted, there were spies, basically people that were snoopers, trying to make sure that the security was not being violated by anybody, including housewives.
Mr. Carper: I’m sure that’s true.
Mr. Kolb: And they would quiz people about their activities at various times: “What were you doing meeting with so-and-so?” I think it was Colleen Black that mentioned that to me.
Mr. Carper: She probably would have.
Mr. Kolb: That even women’s groups getting together, they would want to know what were you talking about, that kind of thing.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So, whether this was military people or F.B.I., or whatever, but they were there, just trying to check up. And maybe just the fact that there were people like that around was a deterrent. And that’s another unique thing about Oak Ridge. The secrecy of the wartime was unique too. In fact, you were knowledgeable about what you were doing.
Mr. Carper: Right, well, they told us to always take our badge off the minute we got out of the plant: “We don’t want people to know that this is where you work.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh is that right?
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that.
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: But you leave your badge at the plant?
Mr. Carper: No, well, only the cover badge. But the one you took home with you, you did not wear it when you went outside the gate, after you went through the guard headquarters. You don’t want anybody to know, associate you with Oak Ridge. And, of course, we all had, most had license plates from other states. That was another problem. But it was a situation where we had an agreement, where the government had an agreement with these other states, with people that came into here did not have to buy a Tennessee license. They could use the license from their home state.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, and how long did that last?
Mr. Carper: I don’t know. It was a few years, but then –
Mr. Kolb: After the war was over, basically?
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But I never even thought about that. So you had your West Virginia plates on your car?
Mr. Carper: Right. And the same thing with our driver’s license. We had a West Virginia driver’s license. We did not have to have Tennessee driver’s license.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, because this was a non-place. Legally, it didn’t exist.
Mr. Carper: When I came into Oak Ridge, when I went back to West Virginia to get my car to bring it down, ’cause it had been brought down by the government the other times, I came in on Magnolia Avenue.
[Tape 2, Side A]
Mr. Kolb: – down from West Virginia, right, to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Carper: That’s right, yeah. I came in on Magnolia Avenue, and I came down, oh, I don’t know how far, and I saw a service station on the right, and I stopped, and I asked the service station, I said, “Can you tell me how to get to Oak Ridge?” He says, “Oak Ridge? No, I don’t even know where it is.” I said, “Thank you,” and I got back in the car, and I started down Magnolia Avenue, and I drove another mile or two and I stopped at another service station. I said, “Can you tell me how to get to Oak Ridge?” He scratched his head and he says, “No, I, I’ve heard of it, but I have no idea how to get to Oak Ridge.” I said, “Thank you.” So I drove on down again, and I stopped in another service station, and asked him and he says, “I’ve heard of it, but really I don’t know, but let me make a suggestion to you,” and he says, “Go down to where you see the L&N Railroad Station, make a right turn, and go out in that direction and stop somewhere out there and ask them.” And I thanked him and I did, I came down, and what it turned out to be was, it wasn’t grown up like it is today. It was Western Avenue, but it wasn’t really Western Avenue then; it was something else. And –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, but you came out on the Old Oak Ridge Highway.
Mr. Carper: The Old Oak Ridge Highway, yeah, which was –
Mr. Kolb: To Karns.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. And so I came out that way, and finally did get to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Was that a highway then?
Mr. Carper: Part of it was; it wasn’t called the Old Oak Ridge Highway. I’ve forgotten what it was now.
Mr. Kolb: But it predated the war.
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, yeah, it predated that. And it didn’t come all the way. It came into right out there where Lovell Road connects to the Oak Ridge Highway now, right there where the Gulf station is, that’s where it came in, right in that area. And that was the new road they had to build down there to the bridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, and what was that? Was that a blacktop surface?
Mr. Carper: That was, yeah. That was blacktop. The other was all two-lane, all the way, but very narrow two-lane. You can go over some of it now at, oh, there are several spots where you can see where it comes in and where it goes off.
Mr. Kolb: It has been straightened.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that takes me back to thinking about when the war ended, you were here when the war ended, too.
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: In August, of ’45.
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And what were you doing, and what happened, or what do you remember about the actual news about the war ending?
Mr. Carper: Well, I think really the big thing is to go back to when we dropped the bomb. That was the important thing, because when we dropped the bomb, and we knew it, we got on the phone from the plant and called our wives.
Mr. Kolb: You were at work?
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, and called our wives and told them.
Mr. Kolb: How did you hear about it?
Mr. Carper: I don’t remember. It was announced some way there that the bomb had been dropped over Hiroshima.
Mr. Kolb: And Oak Ridge was involved.
Mr. Carper: And we knew that Oak Ridge was involved, and so we immediately got hold with our families, because none of us could have told any of our families what was going on.
Mr. Kolb: Right.
Mr. Carper: So we had to call them, because we wanted them to hear it from us that everything was all right: “This is the result of the work that’s been going on here, so when you hear it on the radio,” that was before television, “when you hear it on the radio, you’ll know this is one of the reasons we couldn’t tell you about it beforehand, and we’ll tell you more about it when we get home tonight.” This was basically what we could tell our families at that time.
Mr. Kolb: And were you told you could do that?
Mr. Carper: At that time.
Mr. Kolb: You could open it up.
Mr. Carper: That’s the first time we were able to say what we were doing here. It was on August the 6th, 1945.
Mr. Kolb: And then a few days later, the war did end.
Mr. Carper: Well, the second one was on the 8th of August; it was on Nagasaki. And then a few days later is when the war officially ended.
Mr. Kolb: It must have been a, well I assume it was an extra burden on yourself knowing what was involved, as opposed to those who didn’t know. They couldn’t tell because they didn’t know, so you had to be extra careful not to drop any certain words, like ‘uranium’ or ‘bomb.’
Mr. Carper: That’s right. Well, this is one of the reasons why I said what happened when you took a polygraph exam, ’cause you didn’t know whether you had said something sometime when you weren’t supposed to. And if you were conscientious, you got a reaction on the polygraph.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right. Of course, you intermingle with people from the other plants, X-10, Y-12, to a certain degree, at your church, other places, so you all had different experiences like that.
Mr. Carper: And one of the other problems that I had, I set up the committee that, a three plant committee that put up the rifle range out here on Bear Creek Road. I don’t know, do you know where that is?
Mr. Kolb: Where the guards –
Mr. Carper: Train.
Mr. Kolb: Train, yeah.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. I was involved with that.
Mr. Kolb: My goodness, Harry, what couldn’t you do?
Mr. Carper: In order to do that, we, representatives from all three plants went out there to the –
Mr. Kolb: Were you, had you been, done firing work, I mean, marksman work with the Corps, or how did they pick you to do that?
Mr. Carper: Well, because I suppose that I was just one of the ones that tackled the problems, so I was the K-25 representative. We got, each, Y-12, K-25, and X-10 all had a representative. We went out and rented horses at the stables there where the guard shack is on the road, the highway there; there used to be stables out there, riding stables. We got that and we covered all of the area back over in there that we could where we couldn’t get cars in, to try to find an area that would meet the government regulations of, I’ve forgotten how many miles now, I had it down, for thirty caliber shells. It didn’t have an elevation of over two hundred seventy-two feet high, which was the safety zone, and we finally found this one spot that we thought would be convenient to build the firing range, that could be accessed by any of the three plants within a short period of time. So we timed that off so as to see how many minutes it would take if there was an emergency, and they had the guards out there practicing, to get back to the plant. So we did all of this and set the program up for the different, hundred yard, two hundred, three hundred yard targets out there, for thirty-aught-one, and set up a program of training all the guards, for all three plants.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so you got involved with the guard security training too.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I heard that there were guards on horseback, like you said, patrolling the fence line, all around the perimeter.
Mr. Carper: We did not have them at K-25, no.
Mr. Kolb: Well, this is maybe out towards X-10 more.
Mr. Carper: It could have been. I don’t know that, I did not hear –
Mr. Kolb: There was a guard one day that was, got off his horse and he was doing something with his gun, and he accidentally, the gun went off accidentally and shot and killed his horse.
Mr. Carper: I hadn’t heard that.
Mr. Kolb: And he had to report in, he had to walk in and report that he had shot and killed his horse. Of course, he was relieved of his duty just like that, because horses were precious.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And you never heard that story?
Mr. Carper: No, I had not heard that.
Mr. Kolb: This was the story, but I assume it was true, but you never heard about it, okay.
Mr. Carper: No, we did have patrol cars going around, but I did not know of any on foot.
Mr. Kolb: This is back in the woods, where the cars couldn’t go. But anyway, it was just kind of a novel, novel case. Poor man shot his own horse, and he was never a guard again after that. Couldn’t handle his gun.
Mr. Carper: Oh there was a lot of guard stories, and, of course, I’m sure you heard a lot of those.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Harry, and you were just discussing the security involvement you got back then too. Were you involved with supervising guards too, at all?
Mr. Carper: Never supervising, no. I was responsible for drawing up security problems that involved operating personnel as well as security.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have any interaction with the military or F.B.I. people in that regard?
Mr. Carper: No, the only ones I had contact with really were the Washington people who came in here to talk about security and all, and I was involved with that.
Mr. Kolb: When you say Washington, what branch of the government was that?
Mr. Carper: Well, I think it was GAO, General Accounting Office that came in here on that. But I’m not sure on that. There were Washington representatives here that, because they wanted more security, and I said, “Well, how far do you want to go?”
Mr. Kolb: More security.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. And I said, “We got a security fence, we’ve got a corridor, another security fence. So you’ve got a security fence” –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, there were two fences?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, with a corridor in between, and I said, “We’ve got guard towers, and you’ve got guards in it, then you��ve got a patrol car going around. You got a man in the patrol car. Now, do you put the second man in the patrol car so he can watch the area between the fences? But you know, if you’ve got two, they can get in a conversation. So do you put the third man in the back to keep a watch on the second one?” And I said, “Now you’ve got a threesome. What about that? Do you put the fourth man in? Where do you stop?” I mean, you can’t have one hundred percent. So it depends on how much you want to spend, ninety percent, ninety-five, to get it. So it’s just like the time the captain of the guard force went up in one of the towers out there, and just as he went up through the trap door, he looked and he saw the guard was sitting, and he was asleep.
Mr. Kolb: Oh. Oh no.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. So, when the trap door made a noise, then the guard opened his eyes, and he saw the captain’s shoes, and he said, “Amen. Captain, I’m glad to see you.”
Mr. Kolb: Thought he was praying?
Mr. Carper: And they couldn’t fire the guy.
Mr. Kolb: He had that pre-planned.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. So, so things like that happened.
Mr. Kolb: So there were lots of prayers maybe at various times that were not for real. That’s a pretty good story.
Mr. Carper: It is.
Mr. Kolb: Were there any breaches of security that you are aware of, I mean, from people that got fired because they talked out of turn?
Mr. Carper: No, the only thing, we showed the, and that’s when I developed the phantom badge, was I showed the inability of the existing security programs to cover if I wanted to go in the plant. Quite frankly, I took a woman’s badge from the guard department, with their permission; they knew this. And this was all part of the program. Even the captain knew what I was going to do.
Mr. Kolb: The test of the security.
Mr. Carper: The test of the security. And drove a car in through the guard portal, and held that badge right up in front of the guard, and he passed me on through.
Mr. Kolb: With a woman’s picture.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. And I said, “I’ll show you that this is possibility of getting in.” I had my badge in my pocket, had he challenged me, but I did go in the plant without my badge showing. And I said, “This is one of the reasons we have to change the badge program,�� and that’s when I developed the phantom badge. And I don’t – you, were you involved with that?
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know what that means, ‘phantom badge.’
Mr. Carper: Well, if I had the badge that normally clipped on my, and I walked up to the guard portal –
Mr. Kolb: With your picture on it.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, I laid the badge down, and I said, in my particular case, I said, “R-26,” and they looked in an R and came down to 26, and they pulled a badge out and it had to match my badge. It was a little cover badge that had an opening on the top that went through the clip, and you wore both of those when you were in the plant.
Mr. Kolb: I never had that, but I do remember seeing it sometime, way back.
Mr. Carper: Well, that was my design, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So it was a backup, additional level of identification.
Mr. Carper: That’s right, to keep me out of the plant unless I had authority to go in the plant, because –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. You didn’t know that code where your phantom badge was.
Mr. Carper: That’s right, ’cause if they found my badge – and my badge number’s 11683, that’s my security number. But when I went to a portal, I had to know which portal my badge, I had asked for it to be on, which I could change that from day to day. But I would have an alphabetical number and a numeric number that I had to ask for that would match my badge when I laid it down.
Mr. Kolb: How long did that last?
Mr. Carper: It was there when I left.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: At K-25? ’Cause I don’t recall it being at X-10.
Mr. Carper: But it was several years, yeah, and then they put the turnstile ends for exit, so that you didn’t have to show your badge to go out, and you dropped your cover badge in the box when you left the plant. So we stopped checking people going out of the plant; only checked them coming in.
Mr. Kolb: Well, just to kind of wrap up, Harry, and I don’t want to deter you from any incidents or anecdotes you might think of, because you’ve got a lot of them, I’m sure, but what in your opinion was the most unique? And that maybe now is actually ‘more,’ because my wife always says, there is no such thing as more or most unique. It’s either unique or –
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But, I’ll still say, what was the most unique, or one of the most unique experiences, or types of experiences that you remember from the early days in Oak Ridge, that was different from anything else that you have done or lived in? What do you think is the most unique or unique, if you want to put it that way, from your experiences, whether it’s personal, or work or whatever, if you can characterize it in that way, ’cause there are so many things that went on that you did –
Mr. Carper: Yeah that’s a hard one, Jim, because, you know, mine was so varied.
Mr. Kolb: In terms of the types of people you interacted with or –
Mr. Carper: Let’s see, the Cafeteria and Canteen was the most challenging job I ever had, as I said, because there were ten-thousand-and-one headaches.
Mr. Kolb: You had no background in it, number one.
Mr. Carper: No, except that back when I was in high school, I had worked in a grocery store, A&P and Kroger, both, part-time, and I’d even worked in the meat department in Kroger. And I’d worked for the company stores of the coal company. So I had that background experience. And, of course, my certificate was in bookkeeping and accounting, so I had that background, but I loved to work with people, and my working with the public and meeting the public and all was such that –
Mr. Kolb: Had to be important, yeah.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. So in going into these jobs, it was one of accepting the challenge and trying to find the people who were qualified to do what I needed to get done. And that was the big thing, finding the right people.
Mr. Kolb: And how did that work? I mean, did you have some leeway in picking your people that you wanted to work with you?
Mr. Carper: Oh, yeah. Sure, sure, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And that was just a matter of your ability to understand personalities?
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: And there are thousands of people available, I mean, how in the world did you bear with that?
Mr. Carper: Well, it’s hard to say. You just had to use a gut feeling a lot of times.
Mr. Kolb: In other words, you had known a lot of people, just in various interactions, so you could say, okay, I know this character over here. Eric can do this, and Bill could do that. Fit the round pegs in the round holes and the square pegs in the square holes. Yeah, well, that’s an amazing ability, and it apparently worked pretty well for you.
Mr. Carper: Well, it did and –
Mr. Kolb: And by-and-large, you know, the Oak Ridge experiment worked.
Mr. Carper: It did, you’re right.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: So the diffusion process at K-25 was really a success, wasn’t it?
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, very much so.
Mr. Kolb: It ran until we had so much material, we didn’t know what to do with it. We still have more enriched material than we know what to do with.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. And I suppose they really developed the microwave at K-25, the best I could determine, because the way they developed –
Mr. Kolb: What, were they using microwave ovens?
Mr. Carper: No, the ones we’re using today as a result of what they did at K-25 around the seals.
Mr. Kolb: Oh.
Mr. Carper: You see, the seals had to have complete sealed, so they put the seal down and they put the solder around it, and they hit the buttons on those units, and it became liquid. Turn it off, and it set up. And you could take a fluorescent light bulb and put it in where that was going on and it would light. You could hold it with your hand and take it back and it would go out. And that’s, to me, I feel sure, is the development of the microwave oven, because the microwaves we’re using to melt the solder that went around the seals that were used in the diffusion process, because it had to be so total.
Mr. Kolb: Totally leak tight.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. So –
Mr. Kolb: That was a soldered joint.
Mr. Carper: It was soldered, yes. But right in front of your eyes it would just –
Mr. Kolb: Well, now, what was it, I guess I don’t understand when you say the microwave. They used, did they use electricity –
Mr. Carper: Well, yeah, the electricity was used to –
Mr. Kolb: – passing through the components?
Mr. Carper: I suppose. Now that’s a feat that I cannot tell you about, but I do know that they had those units in the plant, which would, you could just lay the coil of solder around on that and touch the buttons, and it would melt it, just like that.
Mr. Kolb: That’s how they formed the seal.
Mr. Carper: That’s right, but you could pass your hand through it, and you did not have the heat.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Mr. Carper: So I say, I feel that was the forerunner to the microwave oven, because they were using it to melt that solder. I don’t have any way to see that –
Mr. Kolb: It was electromagnetic heating, basically –
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: – which is microwave.
Mr. Carper: I’m not that engineering.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, somebody would know about that.
Mr. Carper: Yes, that’s my guess.
Mr. Kolb: And then, of course, that was all leak tested to make sure it was all done right.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. See, I think we’ve been very fortunate. If you were on security, like I was back in those days, and you went out around some of the river area where the patrol roads are, and you found back in the early days before Melton Hill Lake was set up, that that lake, that river, you could almost, well, some places you could wade it.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you could?
Mr. Carper: Because of the –
Mr. Kolb: During low flow.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. And the fence only went a little farther than the eye could see off of the road, and you got down the river, and there was no fence around this area.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Mr. Carper: I know you didn’t.
Mr. Kolb: I assumed there was a fence continuously.
Mr. Carper: A patrol road going around there, and anybody that wanted to sabotage this plant back in the early days could have been on the other side of the river and watched for the patrol car and timed it, and timed it, and timed it, and they could have crossed that river with nothing more but a small boat and gone up and done their damage, and back down before the patrol car came back around again. And all they had to really do was to plant a good charge with a timer on it at some of those TVA towers.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, break up the electricity production?
Mr. Carper: That’s exactly right.
Mr. Kolb: The transmission towers? Yeah, that’s true.
Mr. Carper: But they didn’t, and we were very, very lucky. And I know that bothered me when I found out about it.
Mr. Kolb: Sort of a weakness.
Mr. Carper: It was a weakness, yeah, it was a weakness. ’Cause we had the power. We could supplement the power from down there. We were tied into the TVA system, so they could get it from us, we could get it from them. But there would have been a problem. And it was my understanding that if the plant shut down, K-25 plant shut down, it would take two hundred days to start it back up again.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, and you couldn’t afford that.
Mr. Carper: No. So they had those enormous generators out throughout the plant, they were finally put in down there, that would keep the process running.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, low level, yeah. I want to switch topics here a little bit. I forgot to bring up an important part of Oak Ridge’s history, and that’s the interaction with the outside world, you know, Clinton, Knoxville, you name it, and I assume you had some contact at various times, shopping or whatever.
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, sure.
Mr. Kolb: What could you tell us about those experiences, Harry? I mean, did the people that didn’t know anything about Oak Ridge, like you said, when you came through, what kind of reaction and what kind of experiences did you have? That opens a big subject, I know, but this is important.
Mr. Carper: Well it is. I’ve heard so many times that a lot of people in the Clinton area resented Oak Ridge. I did not find that true.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Mr. Carper: No. When I went into a civic place or something, in the surrounding communities, I did not find the resentment to Oak Ridge that I hear –
Mr. Kolb: Did you shop in, like, Clinton?
Mr. Carper: Oh, sure, not too much in Clinton, but we did in Knoxville, quite a lot. And back when, oh, Millers was over there, and the other store, I’ve forgotten what the name of it was, but all of those stores over there, and we never had any problems.
Mr. Kolb: Did they identify you as being from Oak Ridge?
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, the mud on your shoes gave you away if nothing else did.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, yeah. Only if you tried to set up credit or something did they have to know where you were from. Otherwise, they didn’t. I know first time or two I went into Millers over there, I went to the credit department, because I knew my wife was coming down, and we would like to have an account set up prior to the time she got here. So I went to them and filled out an application and everything and gave them my telephone number, which was, back then, was 5-3166. Now it’s 483-3166. And I got a call twenty-four hours later that my account had been set up. So I had no problem, and I just didn’t have any problems this way. I’d heard people who had problems, but I did not find this true.
Mr. Kolb: You said you got a call, so you had a home phone?
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: That was not everybody had a phone.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: I guess your supervisory position got you the phone.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause you had to be in contact. They were supposed to be able to contact you if whatever, supervising the cafeteria or whatever, you had to be involved.
Mr. Carper: Just like going back to before I came here, I was with Ford, Bacon, & Davis, who were constructing a butydyne styrene plant in Institute, West Virginia, that Carbide was going to operate. And I was assistant to the chief auditor for Ford, Bacon, & Davis, and the person who audited my books or my papers from Carbide before it went to the defense plant corporation was Oral Reinhardt.
Mr. Kolb: I knew that name.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, Oral came down here. Well, the thing of it was that Oral Reinhardt offered me a job to come to the Institute and work for Carbide and operate, and manage, and be manager of Accounts Receivable Department for Carbide at Institute. The next day, I had an offer from South Charleston plant, from Art Dunlap, to come to the South Charleston plant and be office manager of the Equipment Safety and Fire Control Department. (Excuse me.) And the same day, I had an offer from Ford, Bacon, & Davis to bring me to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: You were overwhelmed with possibilities.
Mr. Carper: Twenty-four hours, I had three offers. And F. Stewart Barnes, who was an Englishman, I loved to hear him talk: “How’ve you been?” But anyway, I thought a lot of him. But he says, “I’ll double your salary if you’ll go to Oak Ridge.” I said, “Where will I live?” And he says, “You’ll live in the barracks.” I said, “In other words, I can’t take my family?” “No.” “Just what are you building down there?” “We don’t know. We’re just building.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know, I just don’t like that idea.” And I talked with Carbide at South Charleston, and I talked to Oral Reinhardt, and I lived in South Charleston, and to go to Institute, I’d had to have driven quite a distance to go up into Charleston and back down through Dunbar and Institute to get to the plant. And I was just a little over a mile from the South Charleston plant, where we lived. So we decided to take the job at South Charleston, which I did. But the day I left, Stewart Barnes handed me his card, and he says, “This is my New York address.” He says, “If you are ever looking for a job, you call this number,” and he says, “I may not be there; I may in Greenland, I may be in Africa, I don’t know, but,” he says, “you’ve got a job. All you have to do is call this number, and they’ll contact me.” So I never did, of course, but I thought it was awfully nice to have that kind of an, when I was leaving, and they gave me a raise, when I gave them a two-weeks notice, they even gave me a raise for the last two weeks since I was there. But I did not get credit for my Ford, Bacon, & Davis service like the people who were here in Oak Ridge, who worked for Ford, Bacon, & Davis and came in with Carbide. They got their credit, but I did not.
Mr. Kolb: Your company credit.
Mr. Carper: But anyway, I was with the South Charleston plant then, and then South Charleston sent me down here. But coming down here as management, why, and not construction, I could have a cemesto house. That made all the difference in the world.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right. You had an early cemesto house.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And that was a “B”, you said.
Mr. Carper: That was a “B”, and that was based on the number of people in your family. And of course, my wife’s mother, who was [widowed], had been for thirty-three years, came to live with us, and this gave me enough to justify a larger house, which – we wanted a “C” house. That would give us the three bedrooms. And Paul McDowell, who was head of housing for Roane Anderson at the time, Management Services, said, “Harry, if you’ll take a “D” house, I’ll give you your choice.��� He says, “We just can’t get people to occupy the “D” houses. They just, they don’t want that big a house. We got some “D” houses that have three secretaries in them. We have some houses that we have,” I was saying three, “We have six engineers living in to try to get the “D” houses occupied.” And he says, “If you’ll take “D” house, I’ll give you your choice of three nice locations.” Well, he gave me the three locations, and they all three were dandy. And we liked this one, and I said, “Well, I know, my boss” at that particular time, “has a man working for him, who is his assistant, who wants one of those houses.” And I said, “Paul, if I take this one at 159 Outer, will you give the other “D” house to this other fellow?” He says, “Well, I’m not supposed to, Harry, but yeah, I will.” And I said, “All right.” So I said, “Don’t tell him I did it.” And this the first time I’m saying anything to anybody; I won’t tell you his name, but he’s no longer here, but, anyway, he got the house he wanted and we got this house, and we went off of the “C” list. So that’s why.
Mr. Kolb: Made a good choice.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, and we –
Mr. Kolb: I’ve never heard that they couldn’t get people to take a “D” over a “C” because of the size.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. The “Ds” were a drag on the market at the time.
Mr. Kolb: Well I’ve heard of people, you know, single – I know one man who had, there were six, like you said, six single men in a “D” and down the street were four single women for a time.
Mr. Carper: Well then the “D” houses became preferred later on, as it was, and, of course, then particularly when you were given an opportunity to buy them, which was in ’57.
Mr. Kolb: Right, yeah, you bought right away.
Mr. Carper: I don’t mind telling you what this house, it���s on the record, you know what the “D” house that I lived in, which gave me a better price on it of course, but this house, at the time, sold for just a little over five thousand dollars.
Mr. Kolb: In ’57.
Mr. Carper: In ’57. And, with a ten-year mortgage at five percent.
Mr. Kolb: Set up through what?
Mr. Carper: H –
Mr. Kolb: FHA?
Mr. Carper: It was HFHA, or some other code there, but it was a division of that. And the local banks handled the paperwork. The Bank of Oak Ridge handled the paperwork.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, guaranteed by the government, basically.
Mr. Carper: Yes, because, you see, the government built this town with the understanding that in five years it would be a ghost town.
Mr. Kolb: Talk about poor planning. Or too good planning.
Mr. Carper: But, it certainly –
Mr. Kolb: It stood up well.
Mr. Carper: It stood up well, yes.
Mr. Kolb: You had a beautiful home here.
Mr. Carper: Well, thank you.
Mr. Kolb: You’d never think it was as old as it is. But, yeah, you’re right, when you talk about poor planning.
Mr. Carper: Now the house we moved into, the “B” house, it was one of the last cemestos they put up, and the end windows at the dining room, one of the sashes were put in upside down. That’s quite right. You know the heavy part of a sash is always at the bottom, thin part at the top? Well, one, the end window there, one is up and one is down in this “B” house that we were in over on –
Mr. Kolb: Well, nobody’s perfect.
Mr. Carper: No. And I don’t think that they really sealed the ductwork very well, because we had, that coal dust came out all over the house, not, nothing compared like this one. I just think they threw that last one together. It was one of the last ones they put up and they just were trying to get it done and get out.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but otherwise they were well-built. I didn’t realize that they used the oak; it was cut down to make the oak flooring. I assumed they brought it in, but now they say they had their sawmills right here locally, and they used the local product and –
Mr. Carper: And if you ever cut into the walls or anything, you’ll find out that the lumber in here, A-1 lumber, but your two-by-four studs are not two-by-fours.
Mr. Kolb: What are they?
Mr. Carper: They’re quarter of an, I think it’s quarter, I did have that figure down, but instead of being three-and-five-eighths, they’re three-and, I think it’s three-and-three-eighths. So your walls are thinner, and instead of being one-and five-eighths, I think it’s one-and-three-eighths. So that’s where they cut the corners. But it’s all grade A-1 lumber.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, no knots.
Mr. Carper: You’ll find that all the way through the houses. They did, that’s one thing they did; they used prime lumber.
Mr. Kolb: Now, I guess you saw, but did you see construction going on? I guess you did. Were they still building house cemestos when you got down here?
Mr. Carper: Some, yes. And, of course, they eventually put four of the hutments together right down on the corner of the school yard, right down there where the Lions Club had their scout troop meet, right down here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, they put four hutments together. The Lions Club did that?
Mr. Carper: No, the government did it so that the Lions Club could use them for the scout troop to meet in. It was right on the edge of the greenbelt here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But after the war?
Mr. Carper: Let��s see.
Mr. Kolb: The hutments were no longer needed?
Mr. Carper: No, after the construction, why, they started clearing out the hutments. And so they moved them. There were ones that they tore down and then ones they moved and put up here.
Mr. Kolb: You said they tore them down. I just always assumed that people bought those hutments, or they were sold and could be used for who knows what, and they just were carted off, but, I mean, did they have a public sale?
Mr. Carper: Not to my knowledge of the hutments. No, I think all the hutments were torn down, ’cause, you see, they didn’t have any running water in them.
Mr. Kolb: No, I know.
Mr. Carper: And the only thing they had was a potbelly stove in the middle of the hutment. And they did have electricity run in for electrical light, but that was it.
Mr. Kolb: I thought maybe they could use them for chicken houses, or something like that, farmers, you know.
Mr. Carper: They may have, but not to my knowledge.
Mr. Kolb: They just destroyed them?
Mr. Carper: If they weren’t used for things like this, well they were destroyed.
Mr. Kolb: So they were all pre-fabricated, brought in here on trucks, truck-beds and things.
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, well, some of the other houses, the victory huts, and the flattops, were sold and moved off. People moved them off if they didn’t redo them. Now, there���s a bunch out on West Outer, out there.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, near the Children’s Museum?
Mr. Carper: Yeah. Some of those –
Mr. Kolb: What do you call those? Victory huts?
Mr. Carper: No, those were flattops. And they went, came back, the government came back and put the peaked roof on them. They used to be just flat.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: They’re kind of like built up on –
Mr. Carper: On stilts. And you can tell if they’re the flattop if they haven’t been redone, is because there’s a big – windows across here, and the little steps that go up and go in the door. And that was the flattop, and then the flattop was on top of it.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that explains that. I never realized that. So that was added after the fact. Flattops became low-slopped roof kind of.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. They just had the roof on there, and then with gravel on the top of it, and that was it. Just to hold the roofing there, and, of course, when you got a leak, you got it, I mean to tell you.
Mr. Kolb: That stuff didn’t last very long, yeah. I tell people to go up and drive along West Outer if they want to see some of the old kind of – some of those there haven’t been sided. You can still see the – now were those cemesto walls, too?
Mr. Carper: No, no, they were plywood, yeah, plywood panels.
Mr. Kolb: Yep, well, Harry, any other final thoughts you might want to contribute, not that we want to rush you, but, you know, this is really great.
Mr. Carper: Well, I don’t know. It’s been a wonderful experience.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF HARRY CARPER
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
with Peggy Carper
March 6, 2002
[Tape 1, Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Harry, why don’t you start out telling us about why and how you got to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Mr. Carper: Okay, Jim. Back in 1945, my boss [Art Dunlap] from the South Charleston Plant of Carbide, that’s in West Virginia, was sent down here, and, of course, working for him up there, he had some problems here, and he called up and asked if I could be sent down there to Oak Ridge on a loan. And so I was sent to Oak Ridge on a thirty, sixty, possible ninety day loan, in the May of 1945. And Art was head of the Equipment Safety and Fire Control Department. And, of course, that was the department we were in in the South Charleston Plant, where I was office manager. And with the problems in setting up equipment safety and fire control, I did [come here], and at the end of about sixty days, Art asked me if I��d be interested in transferring down to Oak Ridge. And I said, “Well, Art, you know, I work for Carbide, wherever they want me.” He says, “Well, we’ll move you down, and when your job is through, we’ll move you back to South Charleston Plant and we’ll have a job for you there at South Charleston.” I said, “All right.” So that’s when we came down.
Mr. Kolb: So it was kind of open ended at that point.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: And did your wife come with you right away?
Mr. Carper: Oh, she came down before I made up my mind, really. I went back in West Virginia and got her and brought her down and let her take a look at Oak Ridge. And then she said, “All right, whatever you want to do.” So we said, all right, go on the housing list, and so we got a house in –
Mr. Kolb: What kind of house?
Mr. Carper: We got a cemesto, a “B” house.
Mr. Kolb: “B”, okay.
Mr. Carper: I’ll have to tell you a little bit about that.
Mr. Kolb: Where was it located?
Mr. Carper: It was on East Price, and I went over every day after work –
Mr. Kolb: That’s where Colleen Black lives.
Mr. Carper: Okay. I went over there and the house had furniture in it, but the yard was in terrible shape, so I worked on the yard for two weeks prior to the time going to West Virginia to get our furniture and move it down. And I worked from the time I got off of work till dark, got it all fixed up, and the day before I was to go back to West Virginia to get the furniture and all, why, the housing people called me and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Carper, you can’t have that house. There’s a court order on it, and they want the furniture. You just can’t have it, that’s all.�� And so what am I gonna do? I said, “My furniture’s already scheduled to come down.” They said, “Well, we’ll give you another house.” And I said, “Where’s that?” And they said, “It’s over on Pelham, 106 Pelham Road.” So I went over and took a look at it, and it was in worse shape than the house that I had worked on for two weeks. The grass and the weeds in the backyard were up almost to my armpits.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my Lord!
Mr. Carper: But anyway, I went back to West Virginia, and we got down here on the train. Odd as it may seem, South Charleston is not that far from Oak Ridge, but getting on a train and coming down, we had our youngster, and we rode a Pullman down, so we got the train at ten o’clock at night in Charleston, and it took nineteen hours to come from Charleston to Oak Ridge by way of train.
Mr. Kolb: Through Knoxville?
Mr. Carper: Through Knoxville, right. And then, of course, the government car met me in Knoxville and brought me into Oak Ridge. But we did, we moved into 106 Pelham Road, and that’s where we lived for, let’s see, until ’48. And, of course, my wife’s mother was with us, and Peggy was pregnant with our second child. So we needed more room, and they gave us a ���D” house to live in with my wife [159 Outer Drive].
Mr. Kolb: This one?
Mr. Carper: This one.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so you moved here in ’48.
Mr. Carper: ’48.
Mr. Kolb: Wow.
Mr. Carper: So I’ve been here all that time, right.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, and you went to work, which plant?
Mr. Carper: It was K-25.
Mr. Kolb: K-25. Happy Valley back then.
Mr. Carper: If that’s what you want to call it.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that’s what it was called.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, there was a community out there.
Mr. Kolb: Which I didn’t know. When I came in ’54, it was gone.
Mr. Carper: Oh yeah, that’s right. The fact is, you see, I was oriented in the old Wheat School.
Mr. Kolb: You were oriented in the Wheat School. Oh, I see.
Mr. Carper: Oriented into Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, they used that as a –
Mr. Carper: That was the employment, they had the employment set up there, and they told us all about it and ran through the security operation and all there in the old Wheat School.
Mr. Kolb: Now, was this all done by Carbide people?
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, yeah. The Wheat School, the old Wheat School was right on a little knoll there, right where the Blair Road cuts off.
Mr. Kolb: Is it near the church?
Mr. Carper: No, it was right on a little knoll there, just on your right after you go down Blair, start down Blair Road off of Oak Ridge Turnpike.
Mr. Kolb: It’s not there anymore.
Mr. Carper: Uhn-uhn.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, seen pictures of it.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So, you were at K-25, and what was your work there, again?
Mr. Carper: Well, I was really a trouble shooter. They call it Industrial Engineering now, but back then, they just called it a trouble shooter. And I set up all the files and everything on equipment safety and fire control. And after that, of course, I took on other assignments, because I was a trouble shooter.
Mr. Kolb: Problem solver, right?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, problem solver. One of the important things I did out there was to develop a system for classified document accountability. That was a real problem with the plant, because when a person terminated, they had to be sure that there were no classified documents in their possessions, and they had to know all of the classified documents that they had read during their stay at K-25.
Mr. Kolb: Had read?
Mr. Carper: Well yeah, yes indeed.
Mr. Kolb: Not just had, but had read.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Carper: So, when all of these things were transpired, I developed a receipt system so that instead of being eight hundred – they were eight hundred man hours behind in posting the move of classified documents, and they had eight people involved, and I set up this receipt system, and we caught up the eight hundred man hours backlog and reduced it down to three people, and we were up to date within the last mail run on every classified document that was in the plant. That system was later adopted by Y-12 and by ORNL and I’m pretty sure it was also adopted by what was then the AEC.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, federal one.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, so it was a pretty good receipt system.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mr. Carper: So we controlled it by paper rather than by posting.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I see, okay. Well, that’s an important –
Mr. Carper: Well, after that, of course, my boss, I suppose one of the best compliments that he ever made, when I got through with that, why, he said –
Mr. Kolb: Who was your boss?
Mr. Carper: My boss at that time was Dick Lowery, and Dick says, “You know, if you don’t do another lick of work from now until the time you’re sixty-five, you’ve paid your salary.” And I said, “Well, that’s fine, but what’s my next assignment?” So they did give me other assignments. I worked on security, and the fact is the phantom badge, that I think was used at the plant when it was closed, I developed because I argued with Washington that the problem was to keep people out of the plant. If they got in the plant, they were going to do their damage, so we spent ninety-nine percent of our money on keeping people out of the plant, rather than covering in and out, in other words, ingress and egress. So I developed that phantom badge system, and that in itself, I think, controlled security out at the plant from an espionage and sabotage standpoint. So –
Mr. Kolb: And K-25 was very, it was very tight security.
Mr. Carper: Very tight security, yeah, so I set up security problems out there to prove just what we needed to get changed.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. Now, when you went in ’45, of course, the Army was involved then.
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Then it switched over to non-military when?
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: About when?
Mr. Carper: Well, it wasn’t very long after that, but I don’t remember the specific time, really, Jim. That’s too far back.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was after the war ended, then it gradually phased over.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. As I understood, at the time when they brought me down, that there were approximately three hundred people that knew what was going on here, and so I don’t know whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, that I was one of the ones that knew what was going on. Because we had to take a polygraph test every six months. Anyone that knew, had any access to top secret information, and every time I’d take it, why, the fellow that gave it, I knew, I knew him very well, I even fished with him, but I’d start down and all of a sudden they’d ask me if I ever disclosed any classified information to an unauthorized person, and by sakes, I’d say no, and that gauge would go up and down just like everything, and then they’d come back in a little bit and say, “Have you ever intentionally disclosed classified information to an unauthorized person?” That line would be just as steady as it could be. They said, “You see, Harry,” says, “you can’t fool it. Your subconscious said, ‘Did you ever say anything to your wife you wasn’t supposed to? Or in the carpool? Or over the telephone, when you weren’t supposed to give classified information over the phone?’” So they always gave me a clear bill of sale on that though.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you kept going.
Mr. Carper: I kept going, that’s right. Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Of course, now, had the war ended when you got here?
Mr. Carper: Oh, no.
Mr. Kolb: Or just before?
Mr. Carper: No, see, the bomb was dropped in August.
Mr. Kolb: And you came in –
Mr. Carper: In May.
Mr. Kolb: In May, okay. But then K-25 was going into production for after the war.
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes.
Mr. Kolb: That was the big push.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Y-12 was shut down shortly after the war. And was K-25 under construction still, or was it operational?
Mr. Carper: No, it was operational. They were finishing up K-25. K-27, K-29, K-31, K-33 were built after that. And then, of course, they had a problem with the in-plant feeding operation out there. This was in 1953. And the Assistant Superintendent of Industrialization walked into my office one morning. He says, “Harry, can I talk with you?” And I says, “Sure, Jim, what’s on your mind?” He says, “Would you be interested in taking over the Cafeteria and Canteen operation?” I said, “What did you say, Jim?” And he repeated himself. I said, “Are you serious?” I said, “That’s the last job in this planet I’d put myself in.” He said, “Well, yes, we’ve lost quite a few hundred thousand dollars a year out there, and the government says we’ve got to do something, and I wonder if you’d want to tackle that.”
Mr. Kolb: So it was a financial problem.
Mr. Carper: I said, “Jim, I’ve got to think about that.�� Well, I was doing cost accounting and budgeting for the Industrialization Division at the time, so I sat there at my desk for thirty minutes, and I didn’t do a thing except think. And I got up and walked down the hall to Jim’s office, and I said, “Could I see you Jim?” And he says, “Sure, come in Harry.” And I walked in and I said, “Jim, I’ve thought it over. I can see ten thousand and one headaches every day, I’ll tell you.” He said, “All right,” he says, “This is Wednesday. I’ll be gone from the plant tomorrow. Friday morning, I’ll take you over and introduce you and you take over, Friday morning at nine o’clock.” I said, “All right.” So Friday morning they took me over and introduced me and I took on the Cafeteria and Canteen. Now we served as many as, over two thousand people in two hour periods in the Cafeteria, one meal a day, and there were seven canteens. Five of them operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The other two just operated during the daytime hours. So I revamped that whole operation, and I suspect I had one of the first self-service type operations in the eastern part of the United States.
Mr. Kolb: Self-service canteen?
Mr. Carper: Absolutely, except for the grill and the cash register, and where we had six people in the Administration Canteen, reduced it down to two.
Mr. Kolb: You were way before your time; you were a cost cutter.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. And we made in the canteen, at the Administration Building, we made twenty-four gallons of coffee every morning in the first forty-five minutes. It was a big operation in the Administration Building.
Mr. Kolb: Now when did this start, now, you took over the canteen?
Mr. Carper: This, in ’53.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so this had been here quite awhile.
Mr. Carper: Oh, yeah, it had. So we made all the canteens a self-service operation except for the grill and the cashier. And the other thing I did, which was quite something at that time, was when I went into the Cafeteria and Canteen operation, they had a back door where they served the colored. And there were no colored people served in the Cafeteria, and I closed all those back doors. And the Union came to me and asked me about it, and I said, “Look, we serve anybody that’s authorized to be in this plant. I don’t care whether they’re employee or a visitor. If we’ve got the food they want to buy, and they’ve got the money to pay for it, we serve them. Not out the back door, though.” And they said, “Well, what about the Cafeteria?” And I said, “Same thing.” He says, “In other words, you��ll serve black people in the Cafeteria?” I said, “Certainly! Do you see any sign that says I won’t?” And he says, “No.” Says, “Will you tell them?” I said, “No.” “What do you mean?” I said, “Just what I told you a while ago. We have food that we’ve prepared for anybody that’s authorized to be inside this plant.”
Mr. Kolb: You integrated the facility.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. So, a few days later, I had a number of blacks come into the Cafeteria, and we serviced them and we never had a problem. And this other thing I changed was when I went over to the Cafeteria, I found all the black help, after the Cafeteria dining room was closed, ate in the kitchen. And I called them together and I said, “Look, what do we do in the kitchen?” And they said, “We cook, we prepare food.” And I says, “That’s right.” I says, “What do we have out front?” “They have a dining room.” I said, “Then why do you eat in the kitchen?” “Oh, we’ve always eaten in the kitchen.” I said, “Well, you’re not going to anymore.” And I said, “From now on, when it’s time for the employees to eat, you take your food and you go out there in the dining room, and you eat like everybody else,” which they did. And I closed up the locker rooms, change rooms in the Cafeteria and made it one for the men and one for the women. And I had no problem.
Mr. Kolb: Well, before you closed the back door to the Cafeteria, did the people bring their lunches in in lunch pails? Or how did they eat?
Mr. Carper: The black people?
Mr. Kolb: Did they all come to the back door?
Mr. Carper: The black ones that didn’t bring their lunch, they went to the back door and got whatever they wanted. And then took it back to their place or outside, sat outside and ate.
Mr. Kolb: So most of them, a lot of them could bring their lunch in. I see, okay.
Mr. Carper: That’s right, yeah. Then, of course, shortly after I got started on the Cafeteria operation, they dumped the Laundry operation on my shoulders too, so I –
Mr. Kolb: On top of the Cafeteria?
Mr. Carper: On the Cafeteria. So I had the Cafeteria, Canteens, and Laundry operation, and I operated that for nine years. And I’ll say this, the first year I operated, I said, “What will you consider a breakeven point?” And they said, “Well, the government feels that if we don’t lose more than one dollar per month per plant employee, that’s close enough to a breakeven. Don’t want to make money, but we don’t want to go in the hole like we have.” He says, “How long will it take you to do that?” I said, “Ninety days.” So I made a lot of changes immediately, and at the end of the year, we had lost one dollar and one cent per month per plant employee.
Mr. Kolb: You’d met your goal.
Mr. Carper: “Hey,” I said, “What do you want to do next year?” And they said, “The same thing.” I said, “All right.” Well, I lost a dollar and two cents per month per plant employee, but I kept my prices down. I still served a cup of coffee for a nickel and a glass of iced tea for a nickel.
Mr. Kolb: Could have raised the price and solved the problem.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. I didn’t want to do that. So the third year, they said, “Do the same thing.” But they had a Union contract that year, and we paid everybody for another, I’ve forgotten how many more holidays, and so that year I lost five thousand dollars. And when I analyzed it, that was the cost of paying all the employees from the Cafeteria and Canteen operation for the holiday they didn’t work. And I just couldn’t cover that that quickly, because it happened during the year. The following year, I took care of that and I made changes, and I covered that, so they said, “We want you to break even.” So I lost two hundred and forty-four dollars that year. So I stayed on top of it. It was a real challenge, and I thoroughly enjoyed the work at the Cafeteria and Canteen. People out in the canteen, Cafeteria would say, “Gee, Harry, that’s delicious, how did you make that?” And I says, “You really want to know?” And they’d say, “Yeah.” I said, ���I’ll bring my chef out. He’s the one that does that. I hired him to do the cooking. I do the administration.” And I could tell you, well, I’ll tell you one good story about the Union. I had a black fellow, name was Pendergrass, and he took care of picking up all of the trash cans and taking them out back and all, and the Union came in and tried to find out, talked to all the employees in the kitchen, asking them if I ever helped them do some of their work. They wanted to put a grievance against me. So Pendergrass, I remember when he told Don this, that was the Union steward, he said, “Now you look here. If I get a trash can or garbage can out there that’s too heavy for me to lift and I stick my head in the office door and say, ‘Mr. Carper, could you give me a hand?’” he says, “I don’t care what he’s doing, he will stop, and he will come out here and help me lift that can up on that truck. So now, if I need you to come in here, I’ll call you. In the meantime, you stay out of here. Because he could say, ‘That’s your job. I’m paying for it. You do it the best damn way you can.’ But he doesn’t do that. He comes out and helps me.” So I had pretty good relationships.
Mr. Kolb: But you never had a –
Mr. Carper: Not a grievance.
Mr. Kolb: – grievance, okay. It sounds like you had quite a few black employees.
Mr. Carper: I had a number of black work shifts.
Mr. Kolb: Was it a majority or just a –
Mr. Carper: No, not a majority, no. We had a strike at the plant, too. And we were in the plant for seventeen days.
Mr. Kolb: Do you remember what year that was?
Mr. Carper: Fifty-three. Shortly after I took over. And we had been assigned, well, I had supervisors, I had forty, forty supervision assigned to me to operate the Cafeteria. We were operating it twenty-four hours a day, instead of just one meal. We fed all during the strike. The first morning, we prepared a hundred and five pounds of bacon and I’ve forgotten how many, I think it was over a hundred dozen eggs to feed the people that had stayed in the plant when the Union walked out. And some of those people had never even boiled water. So we had to go around and teach them the different functions. I had two supervisors, two salaried people working for me, and so we each took different functions in the kitchen and taught people during the first eight hours how to do things, and then left them, and then we’d tell them, you’re gonna have a relief at the end of eight hours. But at the end of eight hours, the person that comes on, you stay with that person until you show them what we have showed you how to do. And then when the next shift comes on, so this is a hand down instruction deal. And we got through that plant, we said we could not make anybody sick. That would blow the Union wide open, you know, the strike. I said, “Every time I turn around, I want to see you washing your hands.” I said, “I got sinks all over this area.” So I said, “You’re going to inadvertently reach up to scratch your head, or you’ll rub your nose. You’re not used to preparing food. So every time you turn around, wash your hands. There’s plenty of soap, there’s plenty of water, and there’s plenty of towels here, and I want it kept that way.” And I said, “Nobody must be” –
Mr. Kolb: Contaminating them.
Mr. Carper: Right. “And you do not eat any foods you wouldn’t eat yourself. If you drop something, put it in the garbage can.”
Mr. Kolb: And wash your hands.
Mr. Carper: “And wash your hands.” So I was right proud of them. They did a terrific job. We got through it without getting anybody sick, and the fact is, people gained weight.
Mr. Kolb: Some people had never cooked before.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. But it was a real experience. It was.
Mr. Kolb: Well, did you ever get a cooking assignment at your house, Harry?
Mr. Carper: Oh, I –
Mr. Kolb: Having this huge responsibility at the plant?
Mr. Carper: Well, I had learned a lot about cooking in my scouting experiences, teaching scouts to cook for Cooking, their badge and all.
Mr. Kolb: When you said you hired all these people, I wouldn’t have the foggiest notion of how to hire a chef. I mean, I guess you take people that say they’re chefs and try them out, or tell me about how you do this.
Mr. Carper: Well, fortunately, the chef that we had there at the time – I did not have to hire a chef; he was there. And he was very cooperative. When they all went out on strike, he said, “Mr. Carper,” he says, “Here’s my telephone number. If you get into a problem, you call me and I’ll tell you what to do, as far as certain foods are concerned.” And, well, you get some idea of what some of the supervisors that were assigned to me to do – I went around this one fellow, and I said, “Well, we’re going to make up the meat loaf today, so would you prepare these green peppers? I have seven pounds of green peppers here,” and I said, “I’d like for you to dice them.” “Oh, sure, I’ll do it.” So, I went and started on away, and I should have known better; I turned around and came back, and he was just cutting up the green peppers. He wasn’t coring, wasn’t taking the seeds out, anything. So I had to re-instruct him as to how you go about dicing the green peppers, you see. So this was the problem I was faced with with people that didn’t know how to cook; but once I gave them the instructions, they were cooperative. They just did a terrific job. I had this one fellow, and I said, “Would you peel me a hundred pounds of potatoes?” “Oh,” he says, “Harry, goodness sakes alive.” He says, “I was on KP in the Army. Can’t you give me something else to do?” I said, “Have you ever seen how we peel potatoes here?” “No.” And I said, “Well, before you make a decision, come out here and let me show you.” So I took him over to the potato machine, peeler machine, and I turned it on and turned the water on, and I took about a peck of potatoes, dumped them in the top, and I said, “Now watch.” And I turned it off, and I rolled the potatoes out and they’d all been peeled because it’s an automatic type machine. “Well,” he says, “If that’s the case, I’ll do it.”
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, “I can do that!”
Mr. Carper: These are some of the experiences I had while I was doing it. In fact they called the dish machine, they called it the “China Clipper.” And the people that operated the –
Mr. Kolb: I wonder why they did that.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, I wonder. But that’s the one they called the “China Clipper.”
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever have to supervise any special meals for dignitaries?
Mr. Carper: Oh, my, yes. Not during the strike. Fact is, I bought special buffet type equipment because, quite frankly, we put on such a good buffet at K-25 that they brought people from X-10 and Y-12 over to K-25 for special dinners in our private dining room we had over there. So, yeah, we did that all the time.
Mr. Kolb: Word got around.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, I had one black woman that – I had a call from the superintendent, he wanted a meal that day at noon, and Tisha Burgess, she was born of slave parents and had been raised in a white home as a servant before she came to work at K-25, and Tisha said, “Mr. Carper, we can’t serve that, ’cause that’s silverware for the private dining room. I don’t have time to polish it.” Well, I said, “Tisha, go over to the laundry and get a box of Tide, and you bring it back, and I’ll show you something.” So she did, came over there, and I said, “Now get a stainless steel tureen out there, soup tureen,” I said, “Put all your silverware in there. Take a cup of Tide, put it in there. Put hot water on it,” and said, “See this piece of magnesium?” I had a piece of magnesium rod that I had used in the anodes for a hot water tank in the Cafeteria or in the Laundry. I dropped that down in there, and I says, “Now shake it a little bit and watch.” And she shook it a little bit, and her eyes got as big as saucers when she saw all the tarnish just suddenly disappear from all the silverware. I said, “Now rinse it, dry it, and put it on the table in there.��� She says, “Mr. Carper, I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Mr. Kolb: Well, I’ve never even heard about that.
Mr. Carper: Well, soft wash, certainly, that’s the way to clean silverware.
Mr. Kolb: I never heard that.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, but anyway, things like that.
Mr. Kolb: The key is magnesium?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, a piece of magnesium and Tide. You need a detergent; you don’t want a soap. Tide is a good detergent for it. And then, in a stainless steel, or, preferably stainless steel.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, not aluminum.
Mr. Carper: You can do your own silverware at home the same way.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I’ll tell my wife that, but, of course, where do you get magnesium?
Mr. Carper: Well, you can buy a little magnesium leaf. You can find them in the store, in the household area. They’re usually there, or a ‘magic leaf’ or something like that.
Mr. Kolb: For this purpose?
Mr. Carper: For this purpose, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I never knew that.
Mr. Carper: After the tarnish comes over onto the magnesium, then you’ll have to take it out and take a piece of sandpaper and sandpaper it off and get it all ready for the next time you use it. It removes the tarnish to the magnesium.
Mr. Kolb: You get a fresh magnesium then.
Mr. Carper: This is right.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve learned something today already.
Mr. Carper: So I had a time with Tisha getting her birth certificate, ’cause there was no record. And what I did, I had to get hold of old family Bibles and back down through the southern part of different states that I would get this, and we finally got enough details to get Tisha a birth certificate.
Mr. Kolb: You said she was the daughter of a slave?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, daughter of a slave. But Tisha was just terrific. She was –
Mr. Kolb: What was her last name?
Mr. Carper: Burgess.
Mr. Kolb: Burgess, okay.
Mr. Carper: Tisha Burgess.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. Was she buried out there at the cemetery out there, possibly?
Mr. Carper: I don’t know, don’t know. I had another young lady, Alberta York, who was a wonderful salad maker. And when we had the strike, she called me up, she lived in Knoxville, and she said, “Mr. Carper, I need the money. Could I come in?” I said, “Alberta, you know I’d love to have you, you’re a wonderful worker,” and I said, “I can’t ask you to come in. If you want to come in, it’s your decision, but if you come in, you bring a suitcase full of what you’re going to need, because you will not be able to leave this plant until the strike is over.” She says, “All right.” In the next few hours, Alberta walked into my office with her grip. I provided her space over at the dispensary where she could sleep. But she worked during the strike. But, here again, after the strike was over, she worked a few weeks, and I finally had a call from her and she says, “Mr. Carper, I’m, I’m leaving.” I said, “Why, Alberta?” She said, “I’m being harassed by the Union. I’m fearful for my children.” She says, “I’m leaving, I’m going to New York, and I have arranged to be a maid for a family up there,” and she says, “I’m sorry to leave you, but I just can’t tolerate this.” So she left. It was a real sad day, because she was a wonderful worker.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, so she paid the price.
Mr. Carper: She had to pay the price. But those are things that I have experienced while I was out at K-25.
Mr. Kolb: Well, anything like that you want to interject, that’s what we want to hear. But let’s move on to your home life a little bit more. You had a young family when you came to Oak Ridge, it sounds like. Just tell me roughly how things were. I mean it was ’45 and things were still pretty crude, right?
Mr. Carper: Oh, indeed they were, yes. I, of course, cover all that in my talk on John Hendrix. Have you ever heard that?
Mr. Kolb: No, I never have. I wish I had.
Mr. Carper: Well, I’ll have to tell you that to begin with. We had a supper club, like you attended the other night at our church. And Patti Loch was there to talk about the Girls Club.
Mr. Kolb: Girls Inc., yeah.
Mr. Carper: It was, back before it was called Girls Inc., it was the Girls Club. And after the dinner was over, she walked over to me and she said, “Would you consider being John Hendrix for the birthday party of Oak Ridge?” I said, “What do you mean, Patti?” And she told me, well, this fellow had been, well, the Playhouse had interviewed people to see who would be selected to be John Hendrix for the birthday celebration, and he had been selected, and my wife would have to tell you his name. I know it but can’t recall it right now. Nall, N-A-L-L. He had been selected and had prepared and made one presentation, I understood, at the Y, and had a heart attack and died.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Carper: And so, here the birthday celebration crew was looking for somebody to take his place.
Mr. Kolb: You hadn’t been one of the other characters.
Mr. Carper: No, I hadn’t applied, no, goodness no. And so, anyway, I said, “I don’t know, Patti, I’ll have to think about it.” And she says, “Well, could you let me know?” And I said, “All right, let me think about it.” Well, I saw, oh, can’t think of his name. That’s the trouble with getting old, you forget names.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right, I’ve got the same problem.
Mr. Carper: Who used to be the –
Mr. Kolb: Paul Ebert?
Mr. Carper: No, it wasn’t Paul. This was the president of the birthday celebration, Dr. – he used to be the –
Mr. Kolb: Smallridge?
Mr. Carper: No, he used to be the doctor for the high school.
Mr. Kolb: Oh.
Mr. Carper: Peggy? Who was the doctor that was the president of the birthday celebration?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Tittle.
Mr. Carper: Tittle, yes. I saw Joe Tittle the following week, and Joe said, “Harry, I’m so glad to hear you are gonna” –
Mrs. Peggy Carper: Was I being paged?
Mr. Carper: Yes. I was remembering that Joe Tittle was the one that Patti had told was gonna, I was gonna be in, who was the other one? Do you remember the other one?
Mrs. Peggy Carper: Was it Chuck Coutant?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, Chuck, all right. Anyway, Joe Tittle saw me and he says, “Harry, I’m so glad you’re going to be John Hendrix.” I said, “Joe, I didn’t say I was going to!” He says, “Oh, yeah, you’ll be it. I know you’ll do a terrific job. We’re going to be glad to have you.” Well, the next day, I saw Chuck Coutant, and Chuck says, “Harry, so glad you’re gonna be.” I said, “Chuck, I haven’t made up my mind yet.” Well, it turns out that I said, okay, I would do it, and I had to do all the research on John Hendrix. And I went to Knoxville and went back through the files in the Knoxville Journal and the Knoxville News Sentinel and went to Clinton, went through the papers over there, and I went down to the Oak Ridge Library, into the Oak Ridge Room, and did all the research that I possibly could on it, and then I began putting my script together to become John Hendrix. In the meantime, I grew a beard, which was what was required. So –
Mr. Kolb: This was 1992?
Mr. Carper: ’92.
Mr. Kolb: The 50th Birthday.
Mr. Carper: In July, in September of ’92, I started becoming John Hendrix. So, I put on the, I thought, the birthday celebration lasted a year, and in December the 31st of ’93, they had a celebration at the Oak Ridge Mall at the close of the birthday. Had a band, we had food, and at 12:00 midnight, my barber, at that time, and I went up on the stage, and he put the cloth around me, and off came my beard.
Mr. Kolb: So John Hendrix went away.
Mr. Carper: That was the end of John Hendrix. Well, in a matter of a few weeks, I started getting calls again for performances of John Hendrix. So I had to decide what I was gonna do. So I finally went out and bought a false beard. And I changed my method of presentation, so that I actually start my presentation out as Harry Carper and then I suddenly become John Hendrix, and I turn around, and with my back to my audience, I get my beard on and my glasses and my hat, and I get my jacket off, and I turn around and say, “Hi. My name is John Hendrix.” And then I go through this, and then down at the end, why, I have become back Harry Carper again, and bring everybody up to date on what’s happened after John Hendrix’ death. So, I even have another performance scheduled for, I don’t know whether it’s this month or next month. So, I’m still doing it.
Mr. Kolb: Still doing it.
Mr. Carper: I’m up around three hundred appearances as John Hendrix, so I’ve done it all over this area, Knoxville, Maryville, Clinton, Kingston; I’ve gone as far as right outside of Nashville. Honey, what was the name of the town we went to outside of Nashville?
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay.
Mr. Carper: What was the name of the town outside of Nashville, where I put on the John Hendrix?
Mrs. Peggy Carper: Hendersonville.
Mr. Carper: Hendersonville. So I went –
Mrs. Peggy Carper: Took our show on the road.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, we went as far as Hendersonville. I’ve been to Crossville.
Mr. Kolb: And you become Mrs. Hendrix.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know about that.
Mr. Carper: But it’s been a wonderful experience to put it on.
Mr. Kolb: I bet, well thank goodness for Patti Loch; she recognized talent where she saw it.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, ah, well, I don’t know about that, but anyway, it has been a wonderful experience to be able to do this.
Mr. Kolb: Well, let’s peel back about forty years, and go back to the forties, and life in Oak Ridge. With a young family, I guess you had a lot of activities.
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes. I was involved with the Boy Scouts at the time. I helped Jack, well, who was the District Executive out of Knoxville. I helped him organize scouting in Oak Ridge. We got things going in Oak Ridge, because it was a problem of being able, since it was a closed area. You see, back in those days, when somebody wanted to come visit you, you had to have a pass arranged for and left at the gate. You had to meet the person at the gate, identify –
Mr. Kolb: Escort them?
Mr. Carper: And escort them, and you were responsible for them and all their activity until they went back out the gate. And usually, it was a twenty-four or forty-eight hour pass is all you got. If it was more than that, then you had to take them down to the guard headquarters, and have a photograph to have a permanent badge made up. You had to sign this and sign that, and so on.
Mr. Kolb: Forty-eight hours or more, you had to get a permanent badge.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, this is right.
Mr. Kolb: So you helped set up the scouting.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Before you got involved, there was no scouting?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, well, it was just, they were trying to get it all set up here, yeah, that was –
Mr. Kolb: So what organizations got involved then, a lot of churches?
Mr. Carper: Churches and we had some of the civic clubs that we wanted to sponsor. They were trying to get organized too. For example, the Lions Club. I was a charter member of the Lions Club.
Mr. Kolb: Right.
Mr. Carper: And we –
Mr. Kolb: Which was what year?
Mr. Carper: 1946. Spring of ’46.
Mr. Kolb: That was before you got here.
Mr. Carper: No, that was after I got here. ’45. I came in ’45.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right.
Mr. Carper: The spring of ’46, we had a, put an article in the paper, Al Bishop did, wanting to know if there were any Lions involved in the Oak Ridge area that would be interested in organizing a Lions Club. And we had a meeting down at the old Oak Terrace. And that was in May. When we got –
[bird noises erupt in the room]
Mr. Carper: My clock.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, I didn’t see that. I thought it was outside.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, we organized, and Al Bishop was elected the first president, and he served May and June of 1946, and then Len Dolen, who was city manager at the time, was elected president for the first full year of the Lions Club, and I was elected president for the following year. I was ’47, ’48. So, ’46, ’47, well, anyway, it was the second full year.
Mr. Kolb: And you had a scout troop? You sponsored a scout troop?
Mr. Carper: Yes, we sponsored a scout troop, and fact is –
Mr. Kolb: Was that just Boy Scouts then?
Mr. Carper: It was Boy Scouts of America, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Not Girl Scouts, just Boy Scouts.
Mr. Carper: Just the Boy Scouts, yeah. Girls had not been admitted back then.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that, okay.
Mr. Carper: No, that’s something that’s been something that’s been in the last few years that girls have been admitted.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, but was there a Girl Scout organization?
Mr. Carper: That I am not sure of. I was not involved at that time with the Girl Scouts. I had been involved with the Girl Scouts back up in West Virginia. I helped organize Girl Scouts up there.
[Tape 1, Side B]
Mr. Kolb: – the Boy Scouts, as you said. But just back to the general living conditions of Oak Ridge at that time, tell me a little bit about the difficulties. When you came here, it was still pretty crude, right?
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, and most of it was dirt and gravel as far as that’s concerned, and just like I was mentioning John Hendrix, I tell in my story that it was so muddy that the government had to build wooden sidewalks so people could get from one place to another without have to wading through the mud, and they built one hundred and sixty-two miles of wooden sidewalks, which is almost the distance from Oak Ridge to Nashville.
Mr. Kolb: That is a fantastic –
Mr. Carper: And that was wooden sidewalks.
Mr. Kolb: – number. I mean, I never heard that before.
Mr. Carper: That’s what it was. So, there was just an awful lot of mud around. Of course, we had the trailer, trailer camp down here where the recreation building is and the municipal building is now, and five thousand trailers in that area. And where the mall is now was called ‘the desert.’
Mr. Kolb: ‘The desert.’ I thought it was called Hutment Village.
Mr. Carper: No, it was called ‘the desert.’
Mr. Kolb: ‘The desert.’ Why?
Mr. Carper: Because that was where the Army did all their maneuvering; they had all their operation there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, was it a field?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, well, wasn’t a field, just a flat area. In fact, it was so flat, that one day a small airplane landed on there. It got lost, and it was a restricted area, of course, and when it rolled to a stop, it nearly scared the life out of the pilot, because the Army was around there with bayonets fixed on the ends of their rifles, and they circled the plane.
Mr. Kolb: This was a private plane?
Mr. Carper: Private plane.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, got lost?
Mr. Carper: Yeah. So that was really something. But that was easy to land a plane on that.
Mr. Kolb: But this was what direction from Hutment Village, east?
Mr. Carper: Oh, there were hutments all down along where the new bank, TN Bank is, there was a bunch of hutments in that area, all through there. And, of course, Woodland was not anything except woodland then. There were no, there were no buildings in there at that time.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, just woods?
Mr. Carper: Just woods. In fact, there used to be what we called Camp Cromer; [it] was a rugged area where the Boy Scouts had their camporees [sic], over in there, so.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, was there a Woodland School there then?
Mr. Carper: Uhn-uhn.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, that came later.
Mr. Carper: That came later.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. So I’ve heard about the mud and the bus system was pretty important, right?
Mr. Carper: Oh, the bus, yes.
Mr. Kolb: You rode the bus to work, I take it, I assume?
Mr. Carper: No, we had – well I did once or twice, but we really had a car pool. And when we go to K-25, right where the guard shack is, I think you know where that is, right beyond the country club, on the right-hand side was a farmhouse and a spring. The spring is still there, and they’ve got it going under the road now, but there used to be so much water and everything and it was so soft that that area would sink. My guess is that there must be fifteen feet of gravel under the bit of that road, right in that area.
Mr. Kolb: Top it up.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, because there was so many – well, when you think of twelve thousand people at K-25, think of the traffic mashing that road down, and it was just all gravel.
Mr. Kolb: Of course, this was after Happy Valley was closed, and people were commuting ���
Mr. Carper: No, still, Happy Valley was still there.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Mr. Carper: Yeah. That was quite a few years later that Happy Valley closed, yeah. I say, quite a few years, it was several years later, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause I came in ’54 and it was gone then.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. You see, there were a lot of hutments out there too.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mr. Carper: The hutments were for J. A. Jones.
Mr. Kolb: Construction people.
Mr. Carper: Construction people. Oh, and they had barracks out there, right at K-25, they had barracks. And they had a bowling alley, and they had a theater. I’m not sure about the bowling alley. They did have a theater. But I believe they did have a bowling alley.
Mr. Kolb: Recreation hall?
Mr. Carper: Recreation area.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. Cafeteria?
Mr. Carper: Yeah. Things like that.
Mr. Kolb: But you were here in town. And I guess you were active in your church, probably, too? (To Mrs. Peggy Carper: Just a little warm-up there is fine. That’s fine, thank you).
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes. (To Mrs. Peggy Carper: I have plenty, thank you, Honey.)
Mrs. Peggy Carper: Do you?
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mrs. Peggy Carper: How ’bout another cookie?
Mr. Kolb: No, no thank you
Mrs. Peggy Carper: No? You?
Mr. Carper: No thank you, Honey.
Mrs. Peggy Carper: Okay.
Mr. Carper: Yes, we were quite interested in the Chapel on the Hill. It appealed to us. We went down and found out it was ecumenical, and so we became members of the Chapel on the Hill, United Church. I served as chairman of the trustees for the church. And fact is, Art Dunlap and I rewrote the constitution and bylaws for the United Church. And then they asked me to be choir director and Peggy to be the organist.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, that’s where you started your choir directing.
Mr. Carper: Well, we had done it; we had done that up in West Virginia.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, I didn’t know that.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, well, we had a program in West Virginia, I digress just a minute.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay.
Mr. Carper: In Beckley, West Virginia, back in ’38, we had a youth choir for the Methodist Temple. We had forty teenagers, and we put on the radio program, brought it on the air at nine o’clock every Sunday morning, had a program from nine to nine-thirty called the Young Peoples Church of the Air.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my.
Mr. Carper: And we had the youth do all the work. Peggy played and I directed, but they sang anthems and we had one young fellow who gave the morning devotional and all this. And nobody over, out of the teens. They had to be in their teens to be a member of the choir. So, thirteen to nineteen. And the interesting part is, the fellow who gave the morning devotionals on that program decided he wanted to go into ministry, and became the minister of the largest Methodist Church in West Virginia. His name was Aldred Wallace.
Mr. Kolb: Wallace, okay.
Mr. Carper: So we were very proud of the fact that he did, and, of course, we left in 1940. I went with Burroughs Adding Machine Company, so we had to stop that operation, but we had served as choir director and organist up there in West Virginia.
Mr. Kolb: So were you the first? Was there a choir at the United Chapel on the Hill when you joined there?
Mr. Carper: Yes, there was a choir there.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and you joined the choir?
Mr. Carper: Yes, Bob Seibert was the organist/choir director. He was a combination organist/choir director, and Bob left and went up north someplace; I forgot where he was.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, you got involved then.
Mr. Carper: And then my wife and I got involved in it. She was.
Mr. Kolb: And you were there for quite a few years, I guess.
Mr. Carper: Till 1951, I believe it was, we were. And then –
Mr. Kolb: Who was the pastor back then, of that church?
Mr. Carper: There was several. At the time we went there, there was Dr. Larson, who was a Presbyterian minister at the time. And then when he left, a fellow by the name of Abel came. After Abel was Bill Huntsman.
Mr. Kolb: Huntsman?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, Bill Huntsman. And –
Mr. Kolb: Now, were these all outsiders who came in?
Mr. Carper: Oh, yeah, from out of the area in. And, I can’t think of the other fellow’s name. And then after he left, or they left, ’cause that was a combination at the time, Harley Patterson came. And then Harley was there for years. And that’s when we left.
Mr. Kolb: But in ’45, when you came, I understand that Chapel on the Hill was interdenominational and it had many chapels, right?
Mr. Carper: Had many chapels, and all the churches that met there met at different times. They had scheduled times, and what we did, we had carts, and these were on rollers, and they put the hymn books for the particular denomination in the cart and locked them with a padlock, and rolled them into a room in the front of the church, and the next group would come in and set the church up for that. We had the Jewish congregation used it, we had the Catholic congregation used it, we had the Methodists, let’s see, yeah, not sure, no, I’m not sure about Methodists. Methodists met in the Ridge Theater.
Mr. Kolb: Too many of them?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, well, scheduling of things per se, ’cause the Presbyterian group that met there met in the afternoon. The United, the church, met at eleven o’clock. But, and I don’t remember all the other schedules, but that was really the first time that you had services once on Sunday instead of twice, because they had to use the facilities for so many different denominations.
Mr. Kolb: Did that include the evening?
Mr. Carper: Through the evening, all the way. And, of course, the front of the church was, the chapel, was built so that it could be used for the different denominations, and based on how they wanted the front of the church, and then it would be cleansed and redone for the next congregation that came in.
Mr. Kolb: It was like that.
Mr. Carper: Yes. The way that things happened.
Mr. Kolb: Was it like an hourly progression?
Mr. Carper: Just about. That was about every two hours. They gave them time to go in and do their job, and then out.
Mr. Kolb: Change, yeah. I just heard about that, I never experienced it.
Mr. Carper: We thought it was quite interesting to have the choir in the back of the church, like they do at the Chapel on the Hill, because this was a demand on the pronunciation of all your words.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you’re further away from the congregation.
Mr. Carper: Well, and you’re behind them, and you’re singing over top of them, so you’ve got, you don’t have the sense of sight that so many times, when you’re in the church, you’re looking at the people, you’re watching them as they sing. You don’t have that. So you have to appeal to the other senses when you’re singing behind them. And so the pronunciation had to be a lot more distinct and understandable, because they weren’t watching you.
Mr. Kolb: Right, right.
Mr. Carper: But that was very interesting, and I remember the Presbyterian Church met, later, they met at the Pine Valley gymnasium, and the preacher there was standing under the basketball pole while he was preaching. That was Bob, well –
Mr. Kolb: That’s all right.
Mr. Carper: Anyway.
Mr. Kolb: Did you switch to First Presbyterian when they got organized, then?
Mr. Carper: Well, not when they got organized. When they got their church started, they built the church where it is right now, and we went there, Peggy was asked to do a, to relieve the organist there, and she had played the organ not only at the Chapel on the Hill, but also at the Chapel in East Village, which was a Christian Science. She had substituted there, ’cause Anna Cebrat was the soloist there. And Anna Cebrat was a wonderful singer. She was librarian for the Oak Ridge School, and so Peggy played for her down there when she sang.
Mr. Kolb: Is that what’s now a Baptist church in East Village?
Mr. Carper: Well, that’s the old dormitory, though the chapel is still on beyond that. It’s a little chapel. I don’t know who’s using that chapel now, but they were Christian Scientists out there. I don’t know whether they are now or not.
Mr. Kolb: That’s Highland Woodland.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, Woodland has the Christian Scientists now.
Mr. Kolb: So then, did she become the organist there at First Presbyterian?
Mr. Carper: Yes, at Presbyterian.
Mr. Kolb: And you followed her?
Mr. Carper: Scarbrough, who was music teacher, Gil Scarbrough, at the high school was choir director, and Peggy took over as organist, because the organist and her husband went to – I think it was Washington, a reassignment. And she was there for a few months when Gil decided that he wanted to be relieved, and I took over, and we stayed there for, oh, nearly thirty years, I suppose.
Mr. Kolb: And did you not sing, or do you sing in the ORCMA Chorus also?
Mr. Carper: I sang at the ORCMA, and Peggy did too. We both sang in the Chorus.
Mr. Kolb: So, were you original members, or when did that start?
Mr. Carper: No, not original.
Mr. Kolb: When did you start singing, later on?
Mr. Carper: I couldn’t tell you the date. It was later on.
Mr. Kolb: I knew I remembered seeing you in the chorus sometime back. So you had a very active musical career, it sounds like. I know, I belong to a choir, so it’s a weekly thing, and if you’re a director, you really have to do a lot of preparation for it. You don’t just walk in and start singing, that’s for sure. So did you have any training in this area, or did you just have a natural feel for it?
Mr. Carper: Well, my wife, for example, is, I think, a natural born musician. Her mother was very musically inclined, and she was an organist and taught music. My wife had one year of piano training when she was twelve years old, and that was it. But she plays piano, and she plays organ, she plays by ear, she plays by music, she can change the key if you want it in another key, so she’s very, very talented, yes.
Mr. Kolb: But you also have a musical ability.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, but not like that. No, not like that. And I tell them, when I teach music, choir, I tell them that ninety percent’s gotta come from the heart, ten percent from the mouth.
Mr. Kolb: Well, yeah, sure.
Mr. Carper: And, so, you’ve got to feel it. You don’t want it to be mechanical. You want to have the feel, there, of the music, so that’s the important thing. And, of course, a few years back in the early fifties, Bob Knight and I got all the choir directors in town together, and we agreed to have the Christmas portion of Handel’s Messiah put on by the combined church choirs. So Bob directed the first year of that, and I directed the second year. I was backup for the first year, and we did this each year. We had a backup choir director, and they took over for the following year. We gave the first performance when the Methodist Church was not quite finished. In fact, there was no benches up there. We had planks on boxes, on what you would normally call orange crates, sitting so that we could get the people in the choir loft there.
Mr. Kolb: About what year are we talking about now?
Mr. Carper: Fifty, about ’53 I suppose it was.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, ’53, okay.
Mr. Carper: Yes, and we had over a hundred members in the choir. And each church had their soloists; we selected soloists, had tryouts for the different solo parts. And so it was a wonderful experience to do that. And Peggy’s mother, who was living with us at the time, played for me in the second year when I directed the combined church choir.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, ’cause I remember going to some of those later on and they don’t do it anymore, which I regret.
Mr. Carper: No, well, they took it to the high school auditorium. They took it out of the church and took it to the high school auditorium one year, and that seemed to kill it, getting it out of the church. Handel’s Messiah, the whole performance, for some reason, the people in town preferred it to be in a church. So, Ed Struxness was one of the choir directors, and –
Mr. Kolb: Was he from Grace Lutheran?
Mr. Carper: Let’s see, Ed Struxness –
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t he from Grace Lutheran, as I recall?
Mr. Carper: I believe he was Grace Lutheran.
Mr. Kolb: As I recall, yeah.
Mr. Carper: I believe it was. And, let’s see, I can’t remember. O’Reilly Barrett, too, was one of the original choir directors for the Presbyterian Church. I don’t know whether you remember Reilly, because he has passed away, but Reilly was, and –
Mr. Kolb: Before you?
Mr. Carper: He was before Scarbrough. It was Reilly, then Scarbrough, then me for the Presbyterian Church.
Mr. Kolb: Good. Well how about your kids, going to school here? Let’s see, you had a child, baby, when you moved here, and so they got into school here.
Mr. Carper: Yes, he was five, and he went to Pine Valley.
Mr. Kolb: Pine Valley.
Mr. Carper: And –
Mr. Kolb: Who was the principal, or do you remember?
Mr. Carper: I don’t remember who was principal over there.
Mr. Kolb: Was it Dodd? ’Cause my wife, Sarah –
Mr. Carper: Well, Dodd was over here at Cedar.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Cedar. My wife taught at Pine Valley. She came in ’55. Taught there three years before we got married.
Mr. Carper: Well, you see, we were up here then, and they went over here to Cedar Hill instead of Pine Valley.
Mr. Kolb: Cedar Hill, okay, so they, your children went to Cedar Hill.
Mr. Carper: Yeah and Bobby Huffman was over here, was one of the teachers that, and we, Peggy had known Bobby up in West Virginia before she came here, and I remember Mrs. Kees was over here and Herbert Dodd.
Mr. Kolb: Were the teachers good? Did you have good rapport with them?
Mr. Carper: Generally speaking, yes. I thought they were very good. I am not a booster of Herbert Dodd. He’s, as far as I’m concerned – but we’ll leave it at that. I had my reasons, but anyway.
Mr. Kolb: He’s passed on now.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. I worked with the Cedar Hills School people in setting up the Sight Room at Cedar Hill through the Lion’s Club, and that was in ’47, I suppose, when we set that special Sight Room up at Cedar Hill School.
Mr. Kolb: A Sight Room.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Tell me about that. I don’t know what that means.
Mr. Carper: Well, it was for the children who had a problem seeing at the time. They enlarged different things and they had special teachers for teaching the children who had sight problems.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see, okay, special books too?
Mr. Carper: Yes. And I don’t know when it was done away with, and I do remember we set it up, because it was encouraged at the time, through the Lion’s Club.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s one of their big programs.
Mr. Carper: Right. As you noticed from my resume, I did receive the distinguished service award for Young Man of the Year from the Junior Chamber of Commerce in 1950.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I was going to bring that up. You were in the Lion’s Club, and the Chamber of Commerce, Junior Chamber of Commerce.
Mr. Carper: No, I was not a member of Chamber of Commerce.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I assumed you were.
Mr. Carper: No, you see, these were nominations from anybody in town. Fact is, one of the ones that you probably did know that was nominated at the same time I was, was an attorney here.
Mr. Kolb: Still alive?
Mr. Carper: No. He was appointed to the judgeship and went to Chattanooga.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, not Wilson.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Wilson?
Mr. Carper: Yeah. He and I were both, there were six of us, and Harvey Bernhardt, Dr. Bernhardt was one, and I can’t remember the others. We were all nominated for young man of the year by the Jaycees, for 1950, and how I got it, I don’t know. It must have been a quirk, because, anyway –
Mr. Kolb: It happened.
Mr. Carper: It happened, yes.
Mr. Kolb: That’s what’s important. Yeah, [I] remember that. Well, you know, your fame has preceded you and followed you Harry, so there you go.
Mr. Carper: I love to do the Junior Chamber beauty pageants. I did enjoy emceeing those when I did that for them down on Blankenship Field. And fact is, I was emcee for the beauty pageant when Sonya Wilde was selected as Miss Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and became Miss Tennessee.
Mr. Carper: And then after that, of course, she married Jake Butcher. And I did enjoy the Christmas parties. I emceed the Christmas parties for Carbide at the high school, three, let’s see, four parties a day. Nine, eleven, one, and three.
Mr. Kolb: That was a busy day, wasn’t it?
Mr. Carper: There were fifteen hundred at each one of them.
Mr. Kolb: That went on for years until Carbide left, and then they didn’t have it anymore.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, I remember, one of the last ones I did, I had a fellow walk up to me, and he says, “Mr. Carper, this is quite special.” And I said, “What do you mean, ‘this is quite special’?” He says, “Well,” he says, “my dad brought me to the Carbide Christmas parties when you were emceeing them years ago, and here I am back with my youngster, and you’re still emceeing them.”
Mr. Kolb: Some people never quit.
Mr. Carper: But it was fun, playing games with the kids from the stage, singing songs and things.
Mr. Kolb: Now Carbide sponsored that. I guess they had other people from the organization involved and supporting it, but from the Carbide organization, that is, or did the community, did the city help out with that?
Mr. Carper: No, this was strictly Carbide. They took care of providing the Santa Claus and providing the stockings with the candy in it that they gave out to all the kids, and we always had a, some kind of a program, like a clown program or an animal program, or something like this, and then we had cartoons. So we had all of this in the one hour program.
Mr. Kolb: Before you had cartoons on TV every day like we do now.
Mr. Carper: Well, there were some cartoons at the time, but mostly at the theater. We used to ask the kids, “What do like to see on Saturday at the show?” “Cartoons!” you know, and I’d talk to them and get them riled up for cartoons.
Mr. Kolb: Well, speaking of entertaining, did you ever act, do any acting in the playhouse here?
Mr. Carper: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, ’cause you might have, because you were selected for John Hendrix there, but I just wondered. I thought you might have.
Mr. Carper: Well, I’ll tell you basically why. Back when I first started doing emcee work, I tried to have everything all set, and I found out that that’s not the way to emcee. You have to have your cues, and that’s it, because the way things happen is not normally the way you want them if you’ve got it all written out. So I adlibbed and in adlibbing, I got to the point where I found it very difficult to memorize something and stick with it. I wanted to adlib it, and you can’t do that on the stage. So I just never did go out for anything where I had to do the strictly memory work. But put me on the stage and let me emcee, and I’ll play it by ear, with cues, then I was in pretty good shape.
Mr. Kolb: Did pretty well there, it sounds like. Did you enjoy going to the playhouse though?
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, yes. We’ve been members of the playhouse for, oh, I don’t know –
Mr. Kolb: Forever.
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: We’re the same way. Tremendous asset to the community. What do you think about or remember from the time when the city opened up, when the vote was taken, and tell us what your reactions were and what went on then. Were you involved in that? I mean, it was a pretty emotional time as I understand it.
Mr. Carper: Well, yes, I was not involved in it personally, other than the fact that we did attend the ceremonies when they had Marie MacDonald and Alben Barkley and Rory Calhoun and Adolphe Menjou here, when the gates were opened, and it was down to the Elza. That’s where the official ceremony took place. And then they had the ribbon across there, and they simulated cutting the ribbon with atomic power, and burning the ribbon through and all, and it was quite a, quite a shindig that they had for the cutting of the –
Mr. Kolb: Big parade.
Mr. Carper: Oh, my, yes, big parade. As I recall, in that parade there were representatives from every state in the United States that were living here, and I’m not sure, but it seemed to me like there was around twenty-some foreign countries that people were living here, that were there from foreign countries, that were here in town at the time.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, were they on a program? They were introduced or something?
Mr. Carper: No, it was just, and we knew that in making up the parade, they had their own country flags and everything, and they marched in the parade, and the state flags, of course. That’s just like the United Church. Back when we were members of the United Church, there were thirty-two different denominations represented in the United Church. Think of that.
Mr. Kolb: Wow, sinners of all stripes.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. That’s why we thought it was so ecumenical.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, of course.
Mr. Carper: We had representatives from all these different churches that had joined together to make up the United Church.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was truly amazing.
Mr. Carper: Even, there was one Catholic in the United Church.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right.
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Of course, the Jewish, they worshiped there, but were they considered one of the thirty-two?
Mr. Carper: No, we were talking about thirty-two different –
Mr. Kolb: Christian.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, thirty-two different Christian denominations were represented on the roll of the United Church.
Mr. Kolb: Wow. How many of those were Baptist?
Mr. Carper: I don’t know. There were a lot of different Baptists, now, they could have been.
Mr. Kolb: There could be half a dozen right there.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, it could have been; right, it could have been.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. That’s always something that has intrigued me about Oak Ridge being unique, in that I come from a very strong Lutheran background, so when I left my family, I was expected to go to a Lutheran church, which I did. But a lot of people in our Lutheran church are from different denominations, and they come to Oak Ridge, and they choose the church that they really like.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Independent of what their parents or their relations expect them to do.
Mr. Carper: This is right.
Mr. Kolb: And this is where Oak Ridge is, you might say, more honest, if you will.
Mr. Carper: This is right, yeah. We found that to be true, Jim, so much so.
Mr. Kolb: And it’s different.
Mr. Carper: It is.
Mr. Kolb: And I’m not saying you shouldn’t follow your tradition, as I have, but it’s just more interesting, because you have contact with so many different types of people.
Mr. Carper: Well, my wife was brought up in the Methodist Church. I was brought up in the Southern Presbyterian Church, and while I was a teenager, I went to a Baptist church. I liked the crowd, and I liked the music program and took part in it there, and –
Mr. Kolb: Both of my daughters went to Baptist churches when they were in high school, or took part in the youth groups, ’cause they were so active, you know, it’s interesting, you know.
Mr. Carper: One of the most interesting experiences I ever had was, we had a Jewish minister, a Jew who had become Christian, and that came and stayed in my mother and dad’s home for a week while he conducted a revival at the Christian church in West Virginia. And this was back in the late twenties.
Mr. Kolb: And that didn’t happen very often.
Mr. Carper: No. And this fellow, I just thought the world of him, and he was a good Christian minister, but he was of Jewish background, had been disowned by his family because he did not stay in the Jewish belief, and the revival, the church couldn’t hold them. They opened the windows, people were outside, they were – everything in our little small town.
Mr. Kolb: He had a real talent.
Mr. Carper: Oh, he really had a talent, yeah. I remember his name: Harry Louan.
Mr. Kolb: There’s a Louan in Oak Ridge. I can’t think of his first name. I don’t think he was Jewish.
Mr. Carper: I’m not sure how he spelled it, but –
Mr. Kolb: But, he always did the connection with Russia. He knew Russian and he could go to Russia and translate or be an interpreter.
Mr. Carper: And speaking of that, you see, they used to give me the – if they had problem people in the plant, they usually asked me to see if I could work them and straighten them out.
Mr. Kolb: Problem people.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. Just didn’t seem to fit in.
Mr. Kolb: Personality you mean, or something?
Mr. Carper: Yeah. I had one that was, that they had asked me to take on that was one of the most unusual experiences I ever had in my life. His name was Jack Rollins. He was assigned to me, and he sat down, he says, “Now, you understand, Harry, that when I was hired, I was told I could work whatever hours I wanted to work in this plant.” And he says, “I work twenty-four hours a day, Monday through Friday.”
Mr. Kolb: My goodness. What?
Mr. Carper: And he says, “Then I go home, which is to Oak Ridge,” and he says, “I go by and I get a shot at the hospital, and I go to my apartment and then I sleep, and I sleep, and I sleep, and Sunday I get up and shower and I head for the plant, and I don’t go home until next Friday.”
Mr. Kolb: Five more days.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Good grief.
Mr. Carper: He says, “Now, what I have is high altitude insomnia, as a result of flying for the Royal Canadian Air Force.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, it’s a medical condition.
Mr. Carper: I said, “All right, Jack, we’ll see how it works out.” Well, it was difficult to supervise a man when you’re only there around nine hours, which is about the time I usually spent at the plant, instead of eight. And Jack was immaculate, his black hair, every hair in place, his clothes were there. He didn’t own an automobile. I never saw him smoke a cigarette, never saw him take a drink of beer. He could pick you or I up by the seat of the pants and the nape of the neck and hold you right out in the air.
Mr. Kolb: Strong?
Mr. Carper: Strong as an ox.
Mr. Kolb: What did he do? What was his job?
Mr. Carper: Any assignment you wanted. I put him on different assignments, one I thought was very important, which did work out that way, was forms coordination. We had so many forms all over the plant. Everybody that wanted something always made up a new form. And so I had him collect all the forms that were in the entire K-25 plant and see if any could be consolidated, so that we could reduce the number of forms that the printing department had to make up, which we did. I can’t tell you how many thousand different forms we had in the final analysis, but Jack did a terrific job on it. But he could speak five foreign languages, could read, write.
Mr. Kolb: He was a talent.
Mr. Carper: He was a genius. He had a photographic memory.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my Lord!
Mr. Carper: And, if you opened up a dictionary and said, “Jack, I can’t pronounce this. Well, let me spell it to you, this word,” and I’d spell it, and I’d say, “Well, what’s it mean?” and he would almost quote what was in the dictionary.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause he had memorized the, my Lord.
Mr. Carper: He was just unbelievable. I tried different things. I took Jack, one day, and I said, “Jack, do you like to hunt?” “Love to hunt.” I said, “Let’s go hunting some weekend.” He said, “All right.” I said, “Will it bother you, not getting to sleep?” “Oh, no, that won’t bother me.” I said, “Well, what about hunting equipment?” “Oh, I’ll get it.” And I said, “All right, how about a place to hunt?” “I’ll get it.” I said, “All right.” So in a few days, Jack says, “I got it all squared away for this Saturday.” I said, “All right, Jack, what time?” He says, “You want to meet me around five o’clock, down at the,” he lived in one of these “A-1” efficiencies. He was not married. He’d been married and divorced years ago. I said, “All right, Jack.”
Mr. Kolb: This is five a.m.?
Mr. Carper: Five a.m. So I pulled down there in the car and here walks Jack out with all the hunting gear on, beautiful, nice shot gun. I said, “Well, where are we going?” He says, “We’ll get the dogs over in Clinton.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh my goodness.
Mr. Carper: I said, “All right.”
Mr. Kolb: Dogs and all.
Mr. Carper: So we went to Clinton. And I said, “You tell me where.” We went out Eagle Bend, and he says, “Here’s the house right here.” It turned out to be Dr. Hoskin’s house, Hoskin Drug Company. He said, “Pull around back.” Pulled it around back. Wasn’t daylight yet. Window raised up up there, the lady says, “Is that you, Jack?” He says, “Yes, it is.” “Well, you know where the dogs are.” And he says, “Yeah.” So we got two bird dogs and put them in the back of the car. And we took off. I said, “Where to now?” Jack directed me. He’d made arrangements with some farmer out there, quail hunting on his property. We stopped and got out, and I thought, well, I’ll find out what Jack’s doing. I said, “These look pretty good, don’t they Jack.” And he says, “Yeah, that looks pretty good.” I said, “Well, let’s go this way.” “Okay.” I just couldn’t get him to disagree. We hunted hard that day with the most beautiful two bird dogs I ever saw in my life. They’d been college trained. All I had to do was signal, and those dogs knew exactly what to do. Didn’t even have to whistle or anything. They did it all by hand sign. Well, we got through, took them back, and Jack was just the perfect hunter. Anything I suggested, no problem. We didn’t get much game that day, but we had a terrific time out there. Jack wore a yellow slicker and a yellow hat when it was raining. You could see him a mile off coming. He walked every place. The only time he didn’t walk was when he rode the bus from K-25 to here, and that was once a week, going one way and back the other. So Jack got to bothering some of the nurses that night, interfering with their work. It came back to me and I confronted him about it and he says, “Yeah, I did, I was up there.” I said, “Jack” –
Mr. Kolb: Was he trying to be romantically involved?
Mr. Carper: No, no, just sitting around, you know. I said, “Jack, we can’t tolerate that. Now, if you keep this up, we’re going to have to put you on an eight hour day.” He says, “Harry, you know I can’t do it. I’ve got to work twenty-four hours.” I said, “Well, then you do the job we’ve assigned you on, stay away from that.” “All right.” Well, this went on for a few weeks, and I got another complaint. I called Jack in, and I said, “Jack, this is the second time. It better not happen again.” It happened a third time, and I said, “Jack, here.” It was written out what he had done, what the complaint had been about. I said, “You read it.” I said, “Is that correct?” He says, “Yes it is.” I said, “You sign it.” He says, “All right.” He signed it. He had read the complaint. And I said, “If it happens again, you’ve had it. I’m just going to have to let you go.” “Okay Harry.” A few weeks passed and it happened again. And I called Jack in, and I said, “Jack, what about so-and-so and so-and-so?” “Yes, Harry, I did.” I said, “Your pay will be waiting for you at the gate.” “Okay.” He walked out and in a very short period of time, he walked back in my office, and he had a package, and he handed it to me, and I said, “What’s this, Jack?” He says, “It’s something I wanted you to have.” I opened it up. It was a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus. He said, “You know, Harry, you were the best boss I’ve ever had.” And I had just fired the guy. And he walked out, and I never have heard from him.
Mr. Kolb: He gave you this Roget’s Thesaurus.
Mr. Carper: He gave me this copy.
Mr. Kolb: As a present.
Mr. Carper: As a present. But he says, “You’re the best boss I’ve ever had. I want you to have this.” And he walked out and that was it. We never knew whether Jack was an espionage agent or not, because Russian was one of the languages that he could do anything he wanted, and he had a photographic memory, look at plans. I never could tie it down.
Mr. Kolb: Is that the last you ever saw of him?
Mr. Carper: That’s the last I ever saw him, last I’ve ever heard of him. But this was one of the several problems, and that was the most interesting one that I had had assigned to me.
Mr. Kolb: That man was an asset, but he could have been recruited.
Mr. Carper: This is right.
Mr. Kolb: Had he – he sounds like kind of a loner, but yet he – was it compulsive in going to these, this problem that he had, going to the nurses?
Mr. Carper: Well, it wasn’t necessarily the nurses. If there were anybody down in Central Control place or anything, he’d go in and bother them.
Mr. Kolb: Was he just wanting to have interaction?
Mr. Carper: I think so, yeah, but they couldn’t get rid of him, you know. And I wasn’t out there to supervise him, and I’d say, “Jack you can’t do it. You do the assignment I’ve given you, but that’s it.”
Mr. Kolb: But you don’t know, I mean, he had a security clearance obviously, and you don’t know what happened after he left here.
Mr. Carper: Don’t know. I’ve often wondered.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, there may be some F.B.I. record somewhere.
Mr. Carper: Could have, yeah. I can see Jack just as well right now, I can see him walking out through the plant, and I tell you, he was quite a guy. He must have weighed about two-hundred-and-twenty-five pounds, about six feet tall, never saw him unshaven, never saw him with a hair out of place.
Mr. Kolb: Well, he could find a job, you know, doing who knows what, there was no problem, but just, well, you were fair with him.
Mr. Carper: He was a genius.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t mistreat him, and you probably had a lot of problems with supervision, and because of his talent, looking jealous if nothing else. That’s an amazing story. Well, I’m sure you’ve got lots of stories of supervising crazies or whatever, but that brings to mind, I was told by somebody that there were in Oak Ridge, and this was probably during the war, I don’t know how long it lasted, there were spies, basically people that were snoopers, trying to make sure that the security was not being violated by anybody, including housewives.
Mr. Carper: I’m sure that’s true.
Mr. Kolb: And they would quiz people about their activities at various times: “What were you doing meeting with so-and-so?” I think it was Colleen Black that mentioned that to me.
Mr. Carper: She probably would have.
Mr. Kolb: That even women’s groups getting together, they would want to know what were you talking about, that kind of thing.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So, whether this was military people or F.B.I., or whatever, but they were there, just trying to check up. And maybe just the fact that there were people like that around was a deterrent. And that’s another unique thing about Oak Ridge. The secrecy of the wartime was unique too. In fact, you were knowledgeable about what you were doing.
Mr. Carper: Right, well, they told us to always take our badge off the minute we got out of the plant: “We don’t want people to know that this is where you work.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh is that right?
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that.
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: But you leave your badge at the plant?
Mr. Carper: No, well, only the cover badge. But the one you took home with you, you did not wear it when you went outside the gate, after you went through the guard headquarters. You don’t want anybody to know, associate you with Oak Ridge. And, of course, we all had, most had license plates from other states. That was another problem. But it was a situation where we had an agreement, where the government had an agreement with these other states, with people that came into here did not have to buy a Tennessee license. They could use the license from their home state.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, and how long did that last?
Mr. Carper: I don’t know. It was a few years, but then –
Mr. Kolb: After the war was over, basically?
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But I never even thought about that. So you had your West Virginia plates on your car?
Mr. Carper: Right. And the same thing with our driver’s license. We had a West Virginia driver’s license. We did not have to have Tennessee driver’s license.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, because this was a non-place. Legally, it didn’t exist.
Mr. Carper: When I came into Oak Ridge, when I went back to West Virginia to get my car to bring it down, ’cause it had been brought down by the government the other times, I came in on Magnolia Avenue.
[Tape 2, Side A]
Mr. Kolb: – down from West Virginia, right, to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Carper: That’s right, yeah. I came in on Magnolia Avenue, and I came down, oh, I don’t know how far, and I saw a service station on the right, and I stopped, and I asked the service station, I said, “Can you tell me how to get to Oak Ridge?” He says, “Oak Ridge? No, I don’t even know where it is.” I said, “Thank you,” and I got back in the car, and I started down Magnolia Avenue, and I drove another mile or two and I stopped at another service station. I said, “Can you tell me how to get to Oak Ridge?” He scratched his head and he says, “No, I, I’ve heard of it, but I have no idea how to get to Oak Ridge.” I said, “Thank you.” So I drove on down again, and I stopped in another service station, and asked him and he says, “I’ve heard of it, but really I don’t know, but let me make a suggestion to you,” and he says, “Go down to where you see the L&N Railroad Station, make a right turn, and go out in that direction and stop somewhere out there and ask them.” And I thanked him and I did, I came down, and what it turned out to be was, it wasn’t grown up like it is today. It was Western Avenue, but it wasn’t really Western Avenue then; it was something else. And –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, but you came out on the Old Oak Ridge Highway.
Mr. Carper: The Old Oak Ridge Highway, yeah, which was –
Mr. Kolb: To Karns.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. And so I came out that way, and finally did get to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Was that a highway then?
Mr. Carper: Part of it was; it wasn’t called the Old Oak Ridge Highway. I’ve forgotten what it was now.
Mr. Kolb: But it predated the war.
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, yeah, it predated that. And it didn’t come all the way. It came into right out there where Lovell Road connects to the Oak Ridge Highway now, right there where the Gulf station is, that’s where it came in, right in that area. And that was the new road they had to build down there to the bridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, and what was that? Was that a blacktop surface?
Mr. Carper: That was, yeah. That was blacktop. The other was all two-lane, all the way, but very narrow two-lane. You can go over some of it now at, oh, there are several spots where you can see where it comes in and where it goes off.
Mr. Kolb: It has been straightened.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that takes me back to thinking about when the war ended, you were here when the war ended, too.
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: In August, of ’45.
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And what were you doing, and what happened, or what do you remember about the actual news about the war ending?
Mr. Carper: Well, I think really the big thing is to go back to when we dropped the bomb. That was the important thing, because when we dropped the bomb, and we knew it, we got on the phone from the plant and called our wives.
Mr. Kolb: You were at work?
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, and called our wives and told them.
Mr. Kolb: How did you hear about it?
Mr. Carper: I don’t remember. It was announced some way there that the bomb had been dropped over Hiroshima.
Mr. Kolb: And Oak Ridge was involved.
Mr. Carper: And we knew that Oak Ridge was involved, and so we immediately got hold with our families, because none of us could have told any of our families what was going on.
Mr. Kolb: Right.
Mr. Carper: So we had to call them, because we wanted them to hear it from us that everything was all right: “This is the result of the work that’s been going on here, so when you hear it on the radio,” that was before television, “when you hear it on the radio, you’ll know this is one of the reasons we couldn’t tell you about it beforehand, and we’ll tell you more about it when we get home tonight.” This was basically what we could tell our families at that time.
Mr. Kolb: And were you told you could do that?
Mr. Carper: At that time.
Mr. Kolb: You could open it up.
Mr. Carper: That’s the first time we were able to say what we were doing here. It was on August the 6th, 1945.
Mr. Kolb: And then a few days later, the war did end.
Mr. Carper: Well, the second one was on the 8th of August; it was on Nagasaki. And then a few days later is when the war officially ended.
Mr. Kolb: It must have been a, well I assume it was an extra burden on yourself knowing what was involved, as opposed to those who didn’t know. They couldn’t tell because they didn’t know, so you had to be extra careful not to drop any certain words, like ‘uranium’ or ‘bomb.’
Mr. Carper: That’s right. Well, this is one of the reasons why I said what happened when you took a polygraph exam, ’cause you didn’t know whether you had said something sometime when you weren’t supposed to. And if you were conscientious, you got a reaction on the polygraph.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right. Of course, you intermingle with people from the other plants, X-10, Y-12, to a certain degree, at your church, other places, so you all had different experiences like that.
Mr. Carper: And one of the other problems that I had, I set up the committee that, a three plant committee that put up the rifle range out here on Bear Creek Road. I don’t know, do you know where that is?
Mr. Kolb: Where the guards –
Mr. Carper: Train.
Mr. Kolb: Train, yeah.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. I was involved with that.
Mr. Kolb: My goodness, Harry, what couldn’t you do?
Mr. Carper: In order to do that, we, representatives from all three plants went out there to the –
Mr. Kolb: Were you, had you been, done firing work, I mean, marksman work with the Corps, or how did they pick you to do that?
Mr. Carper: Well, because I suppose that I was just one of the ones that tackled the problems, so I was the K-25 representative. We got, each, Y-12, K-25, and X-10 all had a representative. We went out and rented horses at the stables there where the guard shack is on the road, the highway there; there used to be stables out there, riding stables. We got that and we covered all of the area back over in there that we could where we couldn’t get cars in, to try to find an area that would meet the government regulations of, I’ve forgotten how many miles now, I had it down, for thirty caliber shells. It didn’t have an elevation of over two hundred seventy-two feet high, which was the safety zone, and we finally found this one spot that we thought would be convenient to build the firing range, that could be accessed by any of the three plants within a short period of time. So we timed that off so as to see how many minutes it would take if there was an emergency, and they had the guards out there practicing, to get back to the plant. So we did all of this and set the program up for the different, hundred yard, two hundred, three hundred yard targets out there, for thirty-aught-one, and set up a program of training all the guards, for all three plants.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so you got involved with the guard security training too.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I heard that there were guards on horseback, like you said, patrolling the fence line, all around the perimeter.
Mr. Carper: We did not have them at K-25, no.
Mr. Kolb: Well, this is maybe out towards X-10 more.
Mr. Carper: It could have been. I don’t know that, I did not hear –
Mr. Kolb: There was a guard one day that was, got off his horse and he was doing something with his gun, and he accidentally, the gun went off accidentally and shot and killed his horse.
Mr. Carper: I hadn’t heard that.
Mr. Kolb: And he had to report in, he had to walk in and report that he had shot and killed his horse. Of course, he was relieved of his duty just like that, because horses were precious.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And you never heard that story?
Mr. Carper: No, I had not heard that.
Mr. Kolb: This was the story, but I assume it was true, but you never heard about it, okay.
Mr. Carper: No, we did have patrol cars going around, but I did not know of any on foot.
Mr. Kolb: This is back in the woods, where the cars couldn’t go. But anyway, it was just kind of a novel, novel case. Poor man shot his own horse, and he was never a guard again after that. Couldn’t handle his gun.
Mr. Carper: Oh there was a lot of guard stories, and, of course, I’m sure you heard a lot of those.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Harry, and you were just discussing the security involvement you got back then too. Were you involved with supervising guards too, at all?
Mr. Carper: Never supervising, no. I was responsible for drawing up security problems that involved operating personnel as well as security.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have any interaction with the military or F.B.I. people in that regard?
Mr. Carper: No, the only ones I had contact with really were the Washington people who came in here to talk about security and all, and I was involved with that.
Mr. Kolb: When you say Washington, what branch of the government was that?
Mr. Carper: Well, I think it was GAO, General Accounting Office that came in here on that. But I’m not sure on that. There were Washington representatives here that, because they wanted more security, and I said, “Well, how far do you want to go?”
Mr. Kolb: More security.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. And I said, “We got a security fence, we’ve got a corridor, another security fence. So you’ve got a security fence” –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, there were two fences?
Mr. Carper: Yeah, with a corridor in between, and I said, “We’ve got guard towers, and you’ve got guards in it, then you��ve got a patrol car going around. You got a man in the patrol car. Now, do you put the second man in the patrol car so he can watch the area between the fences? But you know, if you’ve got two, they can get in a conversation. So do you put the third man in the back to keep a watch on the second one?” And I said, “Now you’ve got a threesome. What about that? Do you put the fourth man in? Where do you stop?” I mean, you can’t have one hundred percent. So it depends on how much you want to spend, ninety percent, ninety-five, to get it. So it’s just like the time the captain of the guard force went up in one of the towers out there, and just as he went up through the trap door, he looked and he saw the guard was sitting, and he was asleep.
Mr. Kolb: Oh. Oh no.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. So, when the trap door made a noise, then the guard opened his eyes, and he saw the captain’s shoes, and he said, “Amen. Captain, I’m glad to see you.”
Mr. Kolb: Thought he was praying?
Mr. Carper: And they couldn’t fire the guy.
Mr. Kolb: He had that pre-planned.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. So, so things like that happened.
Mr. Kolb: So there were lots of prayers maybe at various times that were not for real. That’s a pretty good story.
Mr. Carper: It is.
Mr. Kolb: Were there any breaches of security that you are aware of, I mean, from people that got fired because they talked out of turn?
Mr. Carper: No, the only thing, we showed the, and that’s when I developed the phantom badge, was I showed the inability of the existing security programs to cover if I wanted to go in the plant. Quite frankly, I took a woman’s badge from the guard department, with their permission; they knew this. And this was all part of the program. Even the captain knew what I was going to do.
Mr. Kolb: The test of the security.
Mr. Carper: The test of the security. And drove a car in through the guard portal, and held that badge right up in front of the guard, and he passed me on through.
Mr. Kolb: With a woman’s picture.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. And I said, “I’ll show you that this is possibility of getting in.” I had my badge in my pocket, had he challenged me, but I did go in the plant without my badge showing. And I said, “This is one of the reasons we have to change the badge program,�� and that’s when I developed the phantom badge. And I don’t – you, were you involved with that?
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know what that means, ‘phantom badge.’
Mr. Carper: Well, if I had the badge that normally clipped on my, and I walked up to the guard portal –
Mr. Kolb: With your picture on it.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, I laid the badge down, and I said, in my particular case, I said, “R-26,” and they looked in an R and came down to 26, and they pulled a badge out and it had to match my badge. It was a little cover badge that had an opening on the top that went through the clip, and you wore both of those when you were in the plant.
Mr. Kolb: I never had that, but I do remember seeing it sometime, way back.
Mr. Carper: Well, that was my design, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So it was a backup, additional level of identification.
Mr. Carper: That’s right, to keep me out of the plant unless I had authority to go in the plant, because –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. You didn’t know that code where your phantom badge was.
Mr. Carper: That’s right, ’cause if they found my badge – and my badge number’s 11683, that’s my security number. But when I went to a portal, I had to know which portal my badge, I had asked for it to be on, which I could change that from day to day. But I would have an alphabetical number and a numeric number that I had to ask for that would match my badge when I laid it down.
Mr. Kolb: How long did that last?
Mr. Carper: It was there when I left.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: At K-25? ’Cause I don’t recall it being at X-10.
Mr. Carper: But it was several years, yeah, and then they put the turnstile ends for exit, so that you didn’t have to show your badge to go out, and you dropped your cover badge in the box when you left the plant. So we stopped checking people going out of the plant; only checked them coming in.
Mr. Kolb: Well, just to kind of wrap up, Harry, and I don’t want to deter you from any incidents or anecdotes you might think of, because you’ve got a lot of them, I’m sure, but what in your opinion was the most unique? And that maybe now is actually ‘more,’ because my wife always says, there is no such thing as more or most unique. It’s either unique or –
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But, I’ll still say, what was the most unique, or one of the most unique experiences, or types of experiences that you remember from the early days in Oak Ridge, that was different from anything else that you have done or lived in? What do you think is the most unique or unique, if you want to put it that way, from your experiences, whether it’s personal, or work or whatever, if you can characterize it in that way, ’cause there are so many things that went on that you did –
Mr. Carper: Yeah that’s a hard one, Jim, because, you know, mine was so varied.
Mr. Kolb: In terms of the types of people you interacted with or –
Mr. Carper: Let’s see, the Cafeteria and Canteen was the most challenging job I ever had, as I said, because there were ten-thousand-and-one headaches.
Mr. Kolb: You had no background in it, number one.
Mr. Carper: No, except that back when I was in high school, I had worked in a grocery store, A&P and Kroger, both, part-time, and I’d even worked in the meat department in Kroger. And I’d worked for the company stores of the coal company. So I had that background experience. And, of course, my certificate was in bookkeeping and accounting, so I had that background, but I loved to work with people, and my working with the public and meeting the public and all was such that –
Mr. Kolb: Had to be important, yeah.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. So in going into these jobs, it was one of accepting the challenge and trying to find the people who were qualified to do what I needed to get done. And that was the big thing, finding the right people.
Mr. Kolb: And how did that work? I mean, did you have some leeway in picking your people that you wanted to work with you?
Mr. Carper: Oh, yeah. Sure, sure, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And that was just a matter of your ability to understand personalities?
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: And there are thousands of people available, I mean, how in the world did you bear with that?
Mr. Carper: Well, it’s hard to say. You just had to use a gut feeling a lot of times.
Mr. Kolb: In other words, you had known a lot of people, just in various interactions, so you could say, okay, I know this character over here. Eric can do this, and Bill could do that. Fit the round pegs in the round holes and the square pegs in the square holes. Yeah, well, that’s an amazing ability, and it apparently worked pretty well for you.
Mr. Carper: Well, it did and –
Mr. Kolb: And by-and-large, you know, the Oak Ridge experiment worked.
Mr. Carper: It did, you’re right.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: So the diffusion process at K-25 was really a success, wasn’t it?
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, very much so.
Mr. Kolb: It ran until we had so much material, we didn’t know what to do with it. We still have more enriched material than we know what to do with.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. And I suppose they really developed the microwave at K-25, the best I could determine, because the way they developed –
Mr. Kolb: What, were they using microwave ovens?
Mr. Carper: No, the ones we’re using today as a result of what they did at K-25 around the seals.
Mr. Kolb: Oh.
Mr. Carper: You see, the seals had to have complete sealed, so they put the seal down and they put the solder around it, and they hit the buttons on those units, and it became liquid. Turn it off, and it set up. And you could take a fluorescent light bulb and put it in where that was going on and it would light. You could hold it with your hand and take it back and it would go out. And that’s, to me, I feel sure, is the development of the microwave oven, because the microwaves we’re using to melt the solder that went around the seals that were used in the diffusion process, because it had to be so total.
Mr. Kolb: Totally leak tight.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. So –
Mr. Kolb: That was a soldered joint.
Mr. Carper: It was soldered, yes. But right in front of your eyes it would just –
Mr. Kolb: Well, now, what was it, I guess I don’t understand when you say the microwave. They used, did they use electricity –
Mr. Carper: Well, yeah, the electricity was used to –
Mr. Kolb: – passing through the components?
Mr. Carper: I suppose. Now that’s a feat that I cannot tell you about, but I do know that they had those units in the plant, which would, you could just lay the coil of solder around on that and touch the buttons, and it would melt it, just like that.
Mr. Kolb: That’s how they formed the seal.
Mr. Carper: That’s right, but you could pass your hand through it, and you did not have the heat.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Mr. Carper: So I say, I feel that was the forerunner to the microwave oven, because they were using it to melt that solder. I don’t have any way to see that –
Mr. Kolb: It was electromagnetic heating, basically –
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: – which is microwave.
Mr. Carper: I’m not that engineering.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, somebody would know about that.
Mr. Carper: Yes, that’s my guess.
Mr. Kolb: And then, of course, that was all leak tested to make sure it was all done right.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. See, I think we’ve been very fortunate. If you were on security, like I was back in those days, and you went out around some of the river area where the patrol roads are, and you found back in the early days before Melton Hill Lake was set up, that that lake, that river, you could almost, well, some places you could wade it.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you could?
Mr. Carper: Because of the –
Mr. Kolb: During low flow.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. And the fence only went a little farther than the eye could see off of the road, and you got down the river, and there was no fence around this area.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Mr. Carper: I know you didn’t.
Mr. Kolb: I assumed there was a fence continuously.
Mr. Carper: A patrol road going around there, and anybody that wanted to sabotage this plant back in the early days could have been on the other side of the river and watched for the patrol car and timed it, and timed it, and timed it, and they could have crossed that river with nothing more but a small boat and gone up and done their damage, and back down before the patrol car came back around again. And all they had to really do was to plant a good charge with a timer on it at some of those TVA towers.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, break up the electricity production?
Mr. Carper: That’s exactly right.
Mr. Kolb: The transmission towers? Yeah, that’s true.
Mr. Carper: But they didn’t, and we were very, very lucky. And I know that bothered me when I found out about it.
Mr. Kolb: Sort of a weakness.
Mr. Carper: It was a weakness, yeah, it was a weakness. ’Cause we had the power. We could supplement the power from down there. We were tied into the TVA system, so they could get it from us, we could get it from them. But there would have been a problem. And it was my understanding that if the plant shut down, K-25 plant shut down, it would take two hundred days to start it back up again.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, and you couldn’t afford that.
Mr. Carper: No. So they had those enormous generators out throughout the plant, they were finally put in down there, that would keep the process running.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, low level, yeah. I want to switch topics here a little bit. I forgot to bring up an important part of Oak Ridge’s history, and that’s the interaction with the outside world, you know, Clinton, Knoxville, you name it, and I assume you had some contact at various times, shopping or whatever.
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, sure.
Mr. Kolb: What could you tell us about those experiences, Harry? I mean, did the people that didn’t know anything about Oak Ridge, like you said, when you came through, what kind of reaction and what kind of experiences did you have? That opens a big subject, I know, but this is important.
Mr. Carper: Well it is. I’ve heard so many times that a lot of people in the Clinton area resented Oak Ridge. I did not find that true.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Mr. Carper: No. When I went into a civic place or something, in the surrounding communities, I did not find the resentment to Oak Ridge that I hear –
Mr. Kolb: Did you shop in, like, Clinton?
Mr. Carper: Oh, sure, not too much in Clinton, but we did in Knoxville, quite a lot. And back when, oh, Millers was over there, and the other store, I’ve forgotten what the name of it was, but all of those stores over there, and we never had any problems.
Mr. Kolb: Did they identify you as being from Oak Ridge?
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, the mud on your shoes gave you away if nothing else did.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, yeah. Only if you tried to set up credit or something did they have to know where you were from. Otherwise, they didn’t. I know first time or two I went into Millers over there, I went to the credit department, because I knew my wife was coming down, and we would like to have an account set up prior to the time she got here. So I went to them and filled out an application and everything and gave them my telephone number, which was, back then, was 5-3166. Now it’s 483-3166. And I got a call twenty-four hours later that my account had been set up. So I had no problem, and I just didn’t have any problems this way. I’d heard people who had problems, but I did not find this true.
Mr. Kolb: You said you got a call, so you had a home phone?
Mr. Carper: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: That was not everybody had a phone.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: I guess your supervisory position got you the phone.
Mr. Carper: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause you had to be in contact. They were supposed to be able to contact you if whatever, supervising the cafeteria or whatever, you had to be involved.
Mr. Carper: Just like going back to before I came here, I was with Ford, Bacon, & Davis, who were constructing a butydyne styrene plant in Institute, West Virginia, that Carbide was going to operate. And I was assistant to the chief auditor for Ford, Bacon, & Davis, and the person who audited my books or my papers from Carbide before it went to the defense plant corporation was Oral Reinhardt.
Mr. Kolb: I knew that name.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, Oral came down here. Well, the thing of it was that Oral Reinhardt offered me a job to come to the Institute and work for Carbide and operate, and manage, and be manager of Accounts Receivable Department for Carbide at Institute. The next day, I had an offer from South Charleston plant, from Art Dunlap, to come to the South Charleston plant and be office manager of the Equipment Safety and Fire Control Department. (Excuse me.) And the same day, I had an offer from Ford, Bacon, & Davis to bring me to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: You were overwhelmed with possibilities.
Mr. Carper: Twenty-four hours, I had three offers. And F. Stewart Barnes, who was an Englishman, I loved to hear him talk: “How’ve you been?” But anyway, I thought a lot of him. But he says, “I’ll double your salary if you’ll go to Oak Ridge.” I said, “Where will I live?” And he says, “You’ll live in the barracks.” I said, “In other words, I can’t take my family?” “No.” “Just what are you building down there?” “We don’t know. We’re just building.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know, I just don’t like that idea.” And I talked with Carbide at South Charleston, and I talked to Oral Reinhardt, and I lived in South Charleston, and to go to Institute, I’d had to have driven quite a distance to go up into Charleston and back down through Dunbar and Institute to get to the plant. And I was just a little over a mile from the South Charleston plant, where we lived. So we decided to take the job at South Charleston, which I did. But the day I left, Stewart Barnes handed me his card, and he says, “This is my New York address.” He says, “If you are ever looking for a job, you call this number,” and he says, “I may not be there; I may in Greenland, I may be in Africa, I don’t know, but,” he says, “you’ve got a job. All you have to do is call this number, and they’ll contact me.” So I never did, of course, but I thought it was awfully nice to have that kind of an, when I was leaving, and they gave me a raise, when I gave them a two-weeks notice, they even gave me a raise for the last two weeks since I was there. But I did not get credit for my Ford, Bacon, & Davis service like the people who were here in Oak Ridge, who worked for Ford, Bacon, & Davis and came in with Carbide. They got their credit, but I did not.
Mr. Kolb: Your company credit.
Mr. Carper: But anyway, I was with the South Charleston plant then, and then South Charleston sent me down here. But coming down here as management, why, and not construction, I could have a cemesto house. That made all the difference in the world.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right. You had an early cemesto house.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And that was a “B”, you said.
Mr. Carper: That was a “B”, and that was based on the number of people in your family. And of course, my wife’s mother, who was [widowed], had been for thirty-three years, came to live with us, and this gave me enough to justify a larger house, which – we wanted a “C” house. That would give us the three bedrooms. And Paul McDowell, who was head of housing for Roane Anderson at the time, Management Services, said, “Harry, if you’ll take a “D” house, I’ll give you your choice.��� He says, “We just can’t get people to occupy the “D” houses. They just, they don’t want that big a house. We got some “D” houses that have three secretaries in them. We have some houses that we have,” I was saying three, “We have six engineers living in to try to get the “D” houses occupied.” And he says, “If you’ll take “D” house, I’ll give you your choice of three nice locations.” Well, he gave me the three locations, and they all three were dandy. And we liked this one, and I said, “Well, I know, my boss” at that particular time, “has a man working for him, who is his assistant, who wants one of those houses.” And I said, “Paul, if I take this one at 159 Outer, will you give the other “D” house to this other fellow?” He says, “Well, I’m not supposed to, Harry, but yeah, I will.” And I said, “All right.” So I said, “Don’t tell him I did it.” And this the first time I’m saying anything to anybody; I won’t tell you his name, but he’s no longer here, but, anyway, he got the house he wanted and we got this house, and we went off of the “C” list. So that’s why.
Mr. Kolb: Made a good choice.
Mr. Carper: Yeah, and we –
Mr. Kolb: I’ve never heard that they couldn’t get people to take a “D” over a “C” because of the size.
Mr. Carper: Yeah. The “Ds” were a drag on the market at the time.
Mr. Kolb: Well I’ve heard of people, you know, single – I know one man who had, there were six, like you said, six single men in a “D” and down the street were four single women for a time.
Mr. Carper: Well then the “D” houses became preferred later on, as it was, and, of course, then particularly when you were given an opportunity to buy them, which was in ’57.
Mr. Kolb: Right, yeah, you bought right away.
Mr. Carper: I don’t mind telling you what this house, it���s on the record, you know what the “D” house that I lived in, which gave me a better price on it of course, but this house, at the time, sold for just a little over five thousand dollars.
Mr. Kolb: In ’57.
Mr. Carper: In ’57. And, with a ten-year mortgage at five percent.
Mr. Kolb: Set up through what?
Mr. Carper: H –
Mr. Kolb: FHA?
Mr. Carper: It was HFHA, or some other code there, but it was a division of that. And the local banks handled the paperwork. The Bank of Oak Ridge handled the paperwork.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, guaranteed by the government, basically.
Mr. Carper: Yes, because, you see, the government built this town with the understanding that in five years it would be a ghost town.
Mr. Kolb: Talk about poor planning. Or too good planning.
Mr. Carper: But, it certainly –
Mr. Kolb: It stood up well.
Mr. Carper: It stood up well, yes.
Mr. Kolb: You had a beautiful home here.
Mr. Carper: Well, thank you.
Mr. Kolb: You’d never think it was as old as it is. But, yeah, you’re right, when you talk about poor planning.
Mr. Carper: Now the house we moved into, the “B” house, it was one of the last cemestos they put up, and the end windows at the dining room, one of the sashes were put in upside down. That’s quite right. You know the heavy part of a sash is always at the bottom, thin part at the top? Well, one, the end window there, one is up and one is down in this “B” house that we were in over on –
Mr. Kolb: Well, nobody’s perfect.
Mr. Carper: No. And I don’t think that they really sealed the ductwork very well, because we had, that coal dust came out all over the house, not, nothing compared like this one. I just think they threw that last one together. It was one of the last ones they put up and they just were trying to get it done and get out.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but otherwise they were well-built. I didn’t realize that they used the oak; it was cut down to make the oak flooring. I assumed they brought it in, but now they say they had their sawmills right here locally, and they used the local product and –
Mr. Carper: And if you ever cut into the walls or anything, you’ll find out that the lumber in here, A-1 lumber, but your two-by-four studs are not two-by-fours.
Mr. Kolb: What are they?
Mr. Carper: They’re quarter of an, I think it’s quarter, I did have that figure down, but instead of being three-and-five-eighths, they’re three-and, I think it’s three-and-three-eighths. So your walls are thinner, and instead of being one-and five-eighths, I think it’s one-and-three-eighths. So that’s where they cut the corners. But it’s all grade A-1 lumber.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, no knots.
Mr. Carper: You’ll find that all the way through the houses. They did, that’s one thing they did; they used prime lumber.
Mr. Kolb: Now, I guess you saw, but did you see construction going on? I guess you did. Were they still building house cemestos when you got down here?
Mr. Carper: Some, yes. And, of course, they eventually put four of the hutments together right down on the corner of the school yard, right down there where the Lions Club had their scout troop meet, right down here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, they put four hutments together. The Lions Club did that?
Mr. Carper: No, the government did it so that the Lions Club could use them for the scout troop to meet in. It was right on the edge of the greenbelt here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But after the war?
Mr. Carper: Let��s see.
Mr. Kolb: The hutments were no longer needed?
Mr. Carper: No, after the construction, why, they started clearing out the hutments. And so they moved them. There were ones that they tore down and then ones they moved and put up here.
Mr. Kolb: You said they tore them down. I just always assumed that people bought those hutments, or they were sold and could be used for who knows what, and they just were carted off, but, I mean, did they have a public sale?
Mr. Carper: Not to my knowledge of the hutments. No, I think all the hutments were torn down, ’cause, you see, they didn’t have any running water in them.
Mr. Kolb: No, I know.
Mr. Carper: And the only thing they had was a potbelly stove in the middle of the hutment. And they did have electricity run in for electrical light, but that was it.
Mr. Kolb: I thought maybe they could use them for chicken houses, or something like that, farmers, you know.
Mr. Carper: They may have, but not to my knowledge.
Mr. Kolb: They just destroyed them?
Mr. Carper: If they weren’t used for things like this, well they were destroyed.
Mr. Kolb: So they were all pre-fabricated, brought in here on trucks, truck-beds and things.
Mr. Carper: Oh, yes, well, some of the other houses, the victory huts, and the flattops, were sold and moved off. People moved them off if they didn’t redo them. Now, there���s a bunch out on West Outer, out there.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, near the Children’s Museum?
Mr. Carper: Yeah. Some of those –
Mr. Kolb: What do you call those? Victory huts?
Mr. Carper: No, those were flattops. And they went, came back, the government came back and put the peaked roof on them. They used to be just flat.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay.
Mr. Carper: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: They’re kind of like built up on –
Mr. Carper: On stilts. And you can tell if they’re the flattop if they haven’t been redone, is because there’s a big – windows across here, and the little steps that go up and go in the door. And that was the flattop, and then the flattop was on top of it.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that explains that. I never realized that. So that was added after the fact. Flattops became low-slopped roof kind of.
Mr. Carper: That’s right. They just had the roof on there, and then with gravel on the top of it, and that was it. Just to hold the roofing there, and, of course, when you got a leak, you got it, I mean to tell you.
Mr. Kolb: That stuff didn’t last very long, yeah. I tell people to go up and drive along West Outer if they want to see some of the old kind of – some of those there haven’t been sided. You can still see the – now were those cemesto walls, too?
Mr. Carper: No, no, they were plywood, yeah, plywood panels.
Mr. Kolb: Yep, well, Harry, any other final thoughts you might want to contribute, not that we want to rush you, but, you know, this is really great.
Mr. Carper: Well, I don’t know. It’s been a wonderful experience.
[end of recording]